Datasheet

Identifying Components of Motherboards 7
FIGURE 1.2 Both sides of a riser card with daughterboard
LPX, a technology that lacked formal standardization and whose riser card interfaces
varied from vendor to vendor, enjoyed great success in the 1990s until the advent of the
Pentium II processor and the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). These two technologies
placed a spotlight on how inadequate LPX was at cooling and accommodating high pin
counts. NLX, an official standard from Intel, IBM, and DEC, was designed to fix the vari-
ability and other shortcomings of LPX, but NLX never quite caught on the way LPX did.
Newer technologies, such as micro ATX, and proprietary solutions have been more success-
ful and have taken even more market share from NLX.
86498book.indb 7 7/22/09 5:37:21 AM