Everybody, even the most technologically confused, knows that motherboards exist and perhaps because of this, nobody is quick to admit that they have no clue what these things do. I must confess to having been one of these people. I gamed, I loved PCs and I nodded sagely when these handy things were mentioned, but I was rarely able to contribute much in the way of intelligence to any conversation about motherboards.
So, I got fed up and used the magic of the interweb to discover what it is, exactly, that motherboards do, and why they make a difference to my notebook or PCs performance. This, for those more technologically proficient readers, is a beginner’s guide, so don’t expect any fancy talk.
According to WiseGeek a motherboard “is the underlying circuit board of a computer” into which other components and peripherals are connected. These include the central processing unit (CPU), hard drive, random access memory (RAM) and your disk drives. Lovely. They also have core logic (chipset), interface sockets and input/output ports (I/O).
Motherboards are also CPU manufacturer specific. This has something to do with connectors and other such wibbly bits, so some will only accept a CPU from Intel while others will only accept AMD. If you’re not entirely sure whether or not you have a preference for either of these manufacturers then this shouldn’t worry you too much. Your best bet is to ask a friendly geek who he prefers and run with that.
The motherboard’s job is to relay information between all these different components and peripherals. It has a vital role so it has to be both stable and reliable to ensure your computer actually performs at all, be it notebook, netbook or PC. If it’s patchy, unreliable or prone to quiet lapses of attention then your computer isn’t going to work well. And that drives even Zen people nuts.
If you want a really cheesy analogy, the motherboard could be likened to the heart. It pumps out the lifeblood of the PC and regulates all the other internal organs. Without it, things shut down pretty quickly. It also houses the BIOS. The latter is the Basic Input/Output system which sounds complicated, but isn’t. This is the software that runs when your machine is first turned on, and is usually activated by a hotkey like F2 while you’re booting up.
You can do all sorts of exciting fiddling from within the BIOS, but I wouldn’t advise doing anything particularly involved without either a handbook or some experience.
Now you can nab yourself any number of pre-built PCs, or laptops with specific abilities where someone else has chosen the motherboard for you. But, the more you know about the components that make up your computer the better your position as a user is, and by knowing what motherboard you want, what it does and why, makes you far more likely to buy the right one. You need to ask yourself what you want to use your computer for. Is it to watch movies on the move, play games, do simple word-processing? Each of these will have different motherboard demands – such as dual CPU support for the gamer.
So there you have it. The motherboard in a nutshell. Look, it’s a small nut and there is a ton of stuff you can still learn about these handy beasts, but it’s a good place to start.
Common terms you’ll hear bandied about in Motherboard Speak include:
| Mobo: | This is just geek for motherboard. |
| CPU: | Central processing unit. Choose this before you choose your motherboard otherwise you may discover you have a board that doesn’t support your personal preferences. |
| Processor: | This is the brain and the faster it thinks, the faster things will go. Processors are fascinating creatures. |
| Chipset: | This is two or more integrated circuits that control the interfaces between the system processor, the RAM, the I/O devices and adapter cards. |
| PCI: | This stands for Peripheral Component Interconnect and is a high speed interface for video cards, network cards, modems and sound cards. |