What is Motherboard

Hi Friends,
How are you all,

I hope you enjoyed reading details about processors. Today I am gonna elaborate about one of the most vital components of CPU that is MOTHERBOARD.

In today's article I will try to explain you brief of what motherboard is and other details about motherboard and also helping you select the best suitable to you?

What is motherboard??

A motherboard is the central or primary circuit board making up a complex electronic system, such as a modern computer. It is also known as a mainboard, baseboard, system board, planar board or, on Apple computers, a logic board, and is sometimes abbreviated as mobo.

The motherboard of a typical desktop consists of a large printed circuit board. It holds electronic components and interconnects, as well as physical connectors. It often consists of two components or chips known as the Northbridge and Southbridge, though they may also be integrated into a single component. These chips determine, to an extent, the features and capabilities of the motherboard.

Most motherboards include, at a minimum:

sockets (or slots) in which one or more microprocessors are installed.
slots into which the system's main memory is installed (typically in the form of DIMM modules containing DRAM chips)
a Chipset which forms an interface between the CPU's front-side bus, main memory, and peripheral buses
Non volatile chips (usually Flash ROM in modern motherboards) containing the system's firmware and BIOS
a clock generator which produces the system clock signal to synchronize the various components
slots for expansion cards (these interface to the system via the buses supported by the chipset)
power connectors and circuits, which receive electrical power from the computer power supply and distribute it to the CPU, chipset, main memory, and expansion cards.
Additionally, nearly all motherboards include logic and connectors to support commonly-used input devices, such as PS 2 connectors for a mouse and keyboard.

There are a lot of motherboards on the market to choose from. The big question is, how do you go about choosing which one is right for you?

The first factor to think about concerning motherboards is the size, or form factor. The most popular motherboard form factor today is ATX, which evolved from it's predecessor, the Baby AT, a smaller version of the AT (Advanced Technology) form factor.

The important differential is which CPU the board supports. Two of the biggest makes of CPUs at the moment are Intel and AMD, yet you cannot buy motherboards that support the use of either: it will support one or the other, due to physical differences in the connectors. Furthermore, you must choose a specific type of processor; for example, an AMD Athlon 64 or or Intel Core 2 Duo.

Chipsets are a crucial part of a motherboard, a chipset supports the facilities offered by the processor. A chipset is part of the motherboard, and cannot be upgraded without upgrading the whole board. There are a few main producers of chipsets, which are AMD, Intel, NVidia and Via: The latter two make chipsets for both AMD and Intel processors; AMD and Intel only make chipsets compatible with their own processors.


The next thing is how much RAM you want. RAM, or Random Access Memory, is the main memory in a computer, and is used mainly to store information that is being actively used or that changes often. It is always wise to choose a motherboard that can support more RAM than you currently need. For example, if you want 512MB of RAM in your computer, it would be wise to buy a motherboard that supports at least 1GB of RAM (many now support 4GB). This is simply to help make your computer ‘future proof': if you need to upgrade your memory, you will not need to upgrade your motherboard too.

You are likely to want various expansion cards (such as graphics cards, sound cards and so on). These components tend to have physically different connectors. The PCI-E slot is the most common graphics card interface nowadays, but the AGP slot is still in use.

Aside from the main differences I have covered, there a few more details to consider. All motherboards have USB sockets for peripheral devices. You also need to ensure that your motherboard has the right socket for your drives (hard drive, CD ROM drive, etc), which are generally SATA and IDE.

Unless you have limitless resources, price is always a consideration when buying computer component. A motherboard usually takes up a fairly large part of any PC budget, so it requires careful consideration. A cheap motherboard may be more unreliable and more trouble than it is worth. A motherboard is one of those components where it pays to spend a little extra.

Finally, try to buy from a reputable retailer: It is always worth doing so just in case you have any problems.

That's it for today, I hope you got a brief idea about how you should go about buying a motherboard and a CPU.

Please feel free to comment or write views on the above article. It will help me do better.

Image of Motherboard will be uploaded soon