The Motherboard is the heart and soul of your system. It is the main circuit board of your system and contains the connectors necessary for attaching any additional devices. Our Motherboard buyer’s guide will help make you a more educated shopper by taking you step by step through some of the most important aspects of choosing a motherboard most suitable for your needs.

Chip set

The chipset on a motherboard determines what features, functions and abilities the motherboard will be capable of. This being so, knowing what chipset a particular motherboard uses, can give you a good clue as to what the motherboards potential features and abilities are going to be.

As a general rule, motherboards contain two separate main chips; these two chips are called the north bridge and the south bridge. Each of these chips are extremely important and together they handle all of the communication between the various components of the computer including the CPU, RAM, Sound and video cards, USB Ports and so on.

Below we will discuss each of these chips separately:

The North Bridge Chip

The north bridge controls the communication and throughput speed between the video card, the RAM and the CPU. The speed at which the memory can communicate with the CPU is called the Front Side Bus Speed also commonly known as the FSB Speed. This being so, the north bridge’s FSB Speed is important to know especially if speed is important to you. For Example, If you buy a fast CPU and fast RAM, you need a fast front-side bus otherwise you will experience performance bottleneck. Modern CPUs and RAM come in a variety of ratings for front-side bus speeds and must be matched with an appropriate chipset (which determines the motherboard's front-side bus speed). So, for instance, if you buy a 1GB Stick of DDR400 RAM you need to make sure that the FSB of the motherboard is at least 400MHz otherwise you will be wasting the potential of the RAM.

The north bridge also controls the speed at which information is exchanged with the AGP video slot. The final standard for the AGP slot is that of AGP 3.0 also known as AGP 8X, this standard is rapidly being superseded by the PCI-E standard which circumvents the front side bus altogether and connects directly to the CPU allowing for much greater throughput. For more information regarding AGP and PCI-E please refer to our video card buyer’s guide.

The South Bridge Chip

Also known as the input/output (I/O) controller, this is the chip that controls such things as the sound card, hard drive, USB ports, ethernet and so on.

It is important to realize that chipsets are not like your motherboard BIOS, which can be updated to add features. Chipsets are not like a CPU chip, which can be removed and changed. Chipsets cannot be updated without replacing the motherboard. You need to understand the features and capabilities of a motherboard's chipset to make sure that your goals are going to be met. If you are on a budget, you might look for a chipset that has integrated graphics in the North Bridge and integrated sound, modem and LAN in the south bridge. If you are looking for a gaming system, you need to understand the supported front-side bus speed. Manufacturers base their motherboards around the chip sets they use, adding features like RAID controllers and FireWire ports to differentiate their boards. That's why knowing the vital stats (CPU and memory support, IDE controller speed, and whether sound and graphics are integrated) of the chip sets you're considering can help you pinpoint differences between otherwise very similar motherboards.

Form Factor

In computing, form factor is an industry term for the size, shape and format of computer motherboards, power supplies, cases, add-in cards and so on. Here we will focus on the size and layout of the motherboard. It is important to choose a computer case that accommodates the motherboard form factor.

There are two major form factors where desktop computer motherboards are concerned: ATX (Advanced Technology Extended) and BTX (Balanced Technology Extended). ATX was developed by Intel in 1995 and was designed to replace the AT/Baby AT form factor. There are many variants of the ATX form factor in the form of smaller boards (such as microATX and Flex ATX). These usually provide the basic rear layout but reduce board size and the number of expansion slots. The following table shows the major ATX form factors utilized by today's retail motherboards.

BTX is a newly developed form factor. BTX motherboards utilize new layouts for better heat dissipation and airflow. There are also smaller sized BTX from factors as well, such as microBTX and picoBTX.

The ATX form factor is still the mainstream form factor currently. Only a few retail motherboards utilize the BTX form factor. All AMD compatible motherboards are currently ATX motherboards.

CPU Platform Support

The CPU platform refers to the type of socket that the CPU fits into. You should consider two things when it comes to the CPU support of an Intel compatible motherboard: the chipset and the CPU socket type. The CPU socket or slot is the interface of both the processor and the motherboard. The processor's socket type must match the motherboard's CPU socket to be installed properly. This means that an LGA775 processor must be installed on an LGA775 motherboard.

RAM Support

This refers to the type of ram that the motherboard accepts On Intel compatible motherboards the memory controller is contained within the Northbridge chipset. This means that the memory support - defined by memory type, memory channels, memory speed and memory capacity - is determined by the chipset.

For example, the Intel 945P chipset supports dual channel DDR2 667/533/400 memory with a capacity of up to 4GB. Therefore, motherboards utilizing the 945P chipset can support dual channel DDR2 667/533/400 memory in capacities of up to 4GB. However, this is not always accurate, as chipsets such as the 915P can support both DDR and DDR2 memory, and certain motherboards are made to support higher speed memory (compared to the standard chipset's capabilities). Please be sure to check a motherboard's memory support specifications to make sure.

Graphics Card Interface:

The video card interface, also known as the bus connector, acts as the bridge between the video card and the motherboard. Three types of video card interface are used for video cards: PCI, AGP and PCI-E for more information please refer to our video card buyers guide.

Storage Ports:

PATA (Parallel ATA) and SATA (Serial ATA) ports are used for the connection of hard drives and optical drives. ATA is the acronym for Advanced Technology Attachment. It has been an industry standard hard drive interface for 15 years. ATA uses a 16-bit parallel connection to make the link between storage devices and motherboards, and is also called PATA to distinguish it from the newer SATA standard. In additional, ATA is also known as IDE or EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Drive Electronics).

Currently the two most popular standards for ATA hard drives are the ATA-6 (which is also known as Ultra ATA 100 or Ultra DMA 100) and ATA 133. The maximum bandwidth for the former is 100MB/s, and 133 MB/s for the latter. Most of today’s optical drives utilize the IDE/PATA interface.

The newer SATA interface is also an industry standard for connecting hard drives to computer systems, and is based on serial signaling technology. The advantages over PATA include longer, thinner cables for more efficient airflow inside a computer chassis, fewer pin conductors for reduced electromagnetic interference, and lower signal voltage to minimize noise margin. SATA also offers improved bandwidth over PATA - the SATA 1.0 can reach a maximum of 1.5Gb/s (150MB/s), while the latest SATA 2.5 standard can support up to 3Gb/s (300MB/s). The latter also sports additional features such as NCQ (Native Command Queuing), port multiplier and port selector, although certain non-SATA 2.5 devices may also provide some of these features. As a result of so many advantages, the SATA interface is gradually replacing PATA as the mainstream hard drive interface in the personal storage market.

RAID

Some Southbridge chipsets feature RAID support. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks) is a way of using multiple hard drives together for data storage. A RAID system with multiple hard drives appears as a single drive to the operating system. Depending on the RAID level, the benefits provided by RAID is one or more of the following: better throughput, fault-tolerance or capacity (or something else) when compared to single hard drive.

• RAID level 0 (or RAID 0) is known as striping, where data is striped across multiple hard drives. RAID 0 provides the most advanced throughput and capacity, but offers no fault-tolerance.
• RAID level 1 (RAID 1) is known as mirroring, which stores the exact same data within at least two hard drives, this method shows excellent fault-tolerance and reliability, but delivers less capacity efficiency.
• RAID level 0+1 and RAID 1+0 are both striping and mirroring, providing good fault-tolerance and throughput all at the same time. There are other RAID levels available too, such as RAID level 5 and RAID level 6.

Other Connections

PS/2

PS/2 ports connect the keyboard and mouse to a computer and are usually color-coded on today’s systems - purple for keyboards and green for mice. Most desktop motherboards still provide PS/2 ports, but an increasing number of keyboards and mice are using USB ports.

USB (Universal Serial Bus)

The USB port is the most popular I/O interface standard used for connecting computers and peripherals or other devices. It is capable of supporting up to 127 daisy-chained peripheral devices simultaneously. The latest USB 2.0 specification can deliver 480Mbps data transfer bandwidth.

IEEE 1394

Also known by the trademarked names of FireWire and i.LINK, IEEE 1394 is a standard for high-speed transfer of digital information. It is one of the most popular standards for connecting computers and other digital devices to various components and peripherals, such as external hard disk drives, scanners and digital video camcorders.

Summary

With price points continually coming down and feature sets continually going up, it is a great time to purchase a motherboard. With all of the above considerations in hand you should now be better equipped to make a more informed choice when choosing a motherboard that best suits your needs.