What Is a Chipset?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to tell you a little bit about chipsets. Now a chipset is basically a grouping of hardware that's put out by a manufacturer. You're going to see Intel chipsets and AMD chipsets. Those are the major ones nowadays. Now this is a combination of all the little chips such as bridges, processor enclosures, sometimes even integrated video cards that come on a motherboard that basically make up the basis of your computer system. So if you're using an Intel chipset, that basically means that the processor, possibly the video card, the bridge that ties the bus to the processor and bus is basically another piece of hardware on your motherboard that shoots data around the motherboard between hardware pieces. That means that most of those are made by Intel. And the same thing goes with AMD. Suffice it to say that it is basically the low level controlling hardware in your computer. I'm going to pull up here a little diagram here. This is basically a picture of a motherboard here and the chipset are all of the little controllers and devices that are built into this motherboard including the processor socket, these two bridges and basically possibly even an integrated graphics card if there is one. If you're buying a chipset like I said, it's either going to be from Intel or AMD and honestly I can't say that one is any better than the other although I think Intel is a little more common. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just talked to you a little bit about chipsets."