What is a Motherboard?

The motherboard is the main circuit board inside your PC. Every components at some point communicates through the motherboard, either by directly plugging into it or by communicating through one of the motherboards ports. The motherboard is one big communication highway. Its purpose inside your PC is to provide a platform for all the other components and peripherals to talk to each other. Different components will use different channels of the motherboard circuitry called Buses, aptly named as they carry data from one stop to the next. The fastest of these channels or busses used to be the FSB (Front Side Bus) this connects the CPU to the main memory bank via the Northbridge (which included a memory controller). In modern computers this has been replaced with faster point to point methods of connecting memory to CPU, you may of heard terms such as HyperTransport which is AMD's replacement for the FSB and QPI (Quick Path Interconnect) Intel's version. Other buses on the motherboards are still being used though and perform vital part of a motherboards operation. The PCI and PCI express buses connect add-on card such as sound cards and graphics cards and allow them to communicate with the rest of the computer.

Types of Motherboards

The type of motherboards depends on the CPU it was designed for. You can therefore categorise motherboards by which socket type they have. e.g. Socket A, Socket 478 etc. The Type of motherboard you buy is very important, as it will need to house your CPU, and they are not interchangeable. When buying a motherboard, it will always tell you what socket type it has and usually what CPU's it was designed to be used with. With every new generation of CPU, there is a high likelihood that a new socket type is required. Sometimes this is not just about making it fit, but because the pins of the CPU will be carrying different data and the motherboard must be able to match the CPU exactly. Unfortunately this has meant that in recent times upgrading your PC is not as easy as changing the CPU unless you are simply upgrading in the same CPU family, which doesn't very often have a good cost to performance increase benefit.