so you just bought a shiny new
motherboard and after you're done
looming and eyeing over the heatsinks
that say xtreme gamer that are designed
to look like a battle ax or whatever you
might have noticed all those tiny traces
on the board that connect all of your
ports headers and sockets together and
actually make the board light up and
function correctly and although they're
not particularly exciting traces on
printed circuit boards or PCBs have
basically made all of modern electronics
possible in fact before they became
widespread in the latter half of the
20th century connecting every electrical
component inside of an appliance looked
a little something like this
a huge mass of individual wires this is
actually a look inside of a TV from 1948
and you imagine trying to build a
computer or even buy a flat panel TV if
you had to deal with that
fortunately the idea of embedding wires
in a flat piece of fiberglass really
took off as the years went by making it
possible to fit a PC in a backpack
instead of a giant cabinet but how
exactly then do they pack so many
important connections in such a small
space the process is actually somewhat
similar to how CPUs are manufactured
which you can learn more about in this
video I'll be it add a bit of a less
complicated scale slices of fiberglass
are stacked together and treated with a
resin makes them stick to each other to
make one solid slab then layers of
copper are applied to both sides and
coat it in a chemical called photoresist
after this a pattern that matches up
exactly to the traces that are supposed
to go on the board is placed on top then
the whole thing is exposed to UV light
the board is then washed which well
washes away the uncovered areas leaving
tracks of copper these tracks serve
as a base for how the PCB will
ultimately look after a couple of more
steps including catching additional
copper and more washing but keep in mind
that this process is often done in
layers which is why it's a terrible idea
to try and drill through your
motherboard
if you're having trouble mounting a
cooler to it the Internet has more than
a few tales of people that tried to do
this only to find out that their board
didn't work at all afterwards because
they drilled in the middle of traces
that were visible from the outside but
went right through ones that were inside
of it but that isn't to say that boards
don't get drilled at all during
manufacturing at the factory boards not
only get mounting holes drilled through
them for whatever form factor they
happen to fit in but they also get small
holes to accommodate connections for
small electrical components like chips
capacitors and resistors as well as tiny
interconnects between the different
layers of copper traces so after things
like PCI Express slots heat sinks and
CPU sockets are mounted or soldered to
the board it's basically finished but
since a PCB is just a collection of
electrical connections on some kind of a
substrate you don't actually need any
fancy manufacturing processes to make a
simple one in fact you can even buy
markers that will dispense electrically
conductive ink onto special paper so you
can literally draw your own working PCB
pretty cool but given the inherent
complexity in manufacturing something
like an ATX motherboard I wouldn't count
on being able to make your own one of
those and maybe stick to you know making
LED art that you can stick to your
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