Introduction

We will be focusing on the different types of ports and

connectors available in a common PC. Typically the PC consists of three types of devices.
Input Devices Output Devices Systems Unit

Each type of device must be interconnected in order

for the PC to function properly and this connection is done via specific ports and connectors.

Types of connectors / ports

These are the most

common types available in current PCs.

Communications Port (COM)

Known commonly as the COM port,

there are two varieties of this.

Parallel port

One is the smaller in size serial port

and the other is the larger parallel port also known as the printer port.
The Serial port has 9 pins and usually
Serial port

has a blue color face while the parallel port has 25pins with a pink color face. But there are instances where the serial port has 25 pins too.

Communications Port (COM)

The serial port was used extensively to
Serial cable

connect the keyboard, mouse, printer and the modem. The parallel port was mainly used to connect the printer and the scanner. The reason was the parallel ports had a faster rate of data transfer than the serial one. Usually we find the male type of serial port and the female type of parallel port on the motherboard. These are now obsolete but still can be found in older PCs.
Parallel cable

PS/2
The name PS/2 comes from IBM Personal

System/2 computer for which this interface was initially designed. This is used to connect the keyboard and mouse to the PC. With the distinct colors of purple (keyboard) and green (mouse) it is easy to recognize. It is relatively faster than the serial port.

USB
Universal Serial Bus is the most popular

standard available at present. As the name suggests it is a serial data transfer standard with 4 main versions up to date. USB 1.0, USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. The popularity of USB rose due to
its hot plug ability (the ability to be removed

or connected while the PC is up and running.) The use of powering up devices using its internal power pins.

Speed Comparison

USB 2.0 connector variations

There

are six variations in physical appearance of the port/plug but uses the same USB standard. Although there are many variations, it is easy to locate the port because of its distinctive symbol used in USB devices.

Fire wire
Is also known as the IEEE 1394 interface,

which is used for high speed data communication. It is quite fast than the USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 standards but the latest USB 3.0 has superseded it. Was initially developed for use in data transfer between digital video devices such as cameras, televisions etc. This too is quite similar to the USB technology, where the property of hot plug ability is present. Used to connect printers, scanners, media players, cameras etc..

Firewire 400

Firewire 800

SATA
Serial Advance Technology Attachment is

actually an internal port found on the motherboard and disk drives. It is used to connect internal peripherals like the Hard Disk Drives and Optical Disk Drives. It is a fast interface which has the added advantage of a slim small cable than the older standards and also hot swapping of devices(connecting or removing devices while the system is on). There's a variation of SATA known as eSATA which is aimed at external device connectivity similar to that of USB 2.0 and FireWire800. It is more faster than these two standards.

Speed Comparison

PATA
Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment is a

much older standard used to connect Hard drives and Optical drives. It can be easily identified from the flat large ribbon type cable, usually having two 40 pin heads since a single cable can support two devices. IDE doesnt support hot swapping and if two devices are connected to one cable, they must be given a master and slave status to work. After the last version (Ultra ATA 133) manufacturers have begun to produce less and less PATA interfaced hard drives and optical drives but there is a new version in development which might change all of this.

Video Ports
Here we will look at some of the most commonly

available connectors/ ports used to connect the Visual Display Units to the Systems Unit of a PC.

VGA
Video Graphics Accelerator (VGA) port is the

oldest standard for video in a PC. It is easy to identify with its distinctive blue face with 15 pins. Used mainly with CRT monitors and first generation LCDs since this supports analog video signals only. The initial standard was VGA introduced in 1987 by IBM, later on it was upgraded to as SVGA (Super VGA) which is the actual standard now though it is still referred to as VGA. SVGA supports a maximum resolution of 1600 x 1200.

DVI
Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is the

current popular standard. Since it is a digital standard, there are no video quality loses like in the VGA system. Can be easily identified by the 24 pin connector with a white face. Has the possibility to support up to a maximum resolution of 2560 X 1600. Used in all the new LCD monitors and in some LCD televisions too.

DVI cable

DVI port

HDMI
High Definition Multimedia Interface is an

interface used to transmit both video and audio without any compression. It is used mainly to transmit HD video and audio in a single cable/ port, so is ideal for connecting LCD TVs and PCs. There is no difference in video quality between DVI and HDMI, its just that HDMI is more convenient to use of its single cable for all property.

Types of HDMI

Display Port
This is identical to HDMI in functionality.
But the HDMI port was developed by a

group of companies, so using that interface is costly since the device manufacturers have to pay royalties for its use. Display port is a royalty free standard. This is why the current trend is to use display port as the main interface.

Audio Ports
Analog Input / Output Usually there are 6 ports in this type always bundled together. Unlike the earlier models, new motherboards have high quality Sound IC's which can provide high quality surround experience to the user.So we will find these ports on the motherboard itself most of the time. S/PDIF Output Sony Philips Digital Interconnect Format is used to carry compressed digital audio from the motherboards sound IC to surround sound system which supports that standard. Because of advance encoding / decoding systems, digital audio is considered to be of superior quality than that of analog. So this interface is useful to get a good sound experience.

The End.