Everyone who use computer is aware of the fact that leads are very important part of your computer system. For connecting different device internally or externally to your computer you need a lead or cable. If anyone is using computer for the very first time in his life then for sure it would be little difficult for him to understand about different types of computer cables. But to guide the bingers we are going to start our discussion from the main types of leads. Mainly there are five types of computer leads. Each one of them serves a unique purpose. The list is as followed
- Power Cable
- Video Cable or VGA
- Drive Cable
- USB Cable
- Network Cable
Power cable is the main and most important lead (cable). It is one which enables to connect your system with external power supply outlet. As we all know that without electric supply computer would not work. So once you connect this lead to your system, your system is now ready to be switched on.
A next type of leads is video cable. All the visuals that you can see on your monitor screen are converted from data into visual because of video cable. There are many different types of video cables like VGA (Video Graphics Array) and DVI (Digital Visual Interface). VGA is used for the connection between computer and monitor. VGA use three different rows of contacts, each one of those is used for different channels- red, green and blue. But now days, VGA is replaced by DVI. All the video cards available in markets are now equipped with DVI. Difference between these two leads is that VGA carry analog signals from graphic card and DVI carries digital signals from the graphic card.
Drive cable as the name is telling us that it is used to connect different hardware’s within the cpu with motherboard. Motherboard is the main hub for all the hardware’s which are being used in your CPU system. For the purpose of communication of all the hardware they are connected with motherboard.
Some most commonly used drive leads are IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics), ATA (AT Attachment), SATA (Serial AT Attachment) and e-SATA (External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). IDE are used to connect the storage devices and CD-ROM with motherboard. It is a ribbon cable and use mostly two or more connectors, one of them is attached with motherboard and rest use to be attached with different devices.ATA cables give you length of 18 inches because of which it can be used internally and in limited area. ATA are now replaced by SATA, because of the higher data transfer speed. SATA cables have two 8-pin connectors which are used to connect the cable with the motherboard.
The most popular type of leads is USB lead. This is used to connect the external devices to the computer system. USB (Universal Serial Bus) is not only used to connect external devices but with that two systems can also be connected with the help of this lead. There are three types of USB cables. USB 1.0/1.1 which provides data transfer speed up to 12Mbit/s, USB 2.0 which provides data transfer speed up to 480Mbit/s, USB 3.0 which provides data transfer speed up to 600MB/s.
The last one that we are going to discuss here is network cable. These leads are used to connect the systems in a network with other systems and appliances. But most commonly it is used to connect the computer system to a cable modem, which allows the system to be linked to internet or intranet. CAT 5, CAT 6, FireWire and RJ 45 are some types of network cables.