Motherboard Buyers’ Guide

A motherboard can be thought of as the foundation for any computer system. It is the largest component in your computer and provides pathways for all other devices, internal and external, to communicate with each other. Therefore, it is vital that you spend some time researching for a good quality motherboard.

Main motherboard specifications Before you run out looking for a motherboard, it’s best to know a little about the components that make up the motherboard.

Chipset

There are two main chipsets on a motherboard, the Northbridge and Southbridge controller. The Northbridge handles communications with high speed components such as the CPU, Memory, and graphics card. Conversely, the Southbridge handles communication from low speed devices such as I/O ports, hard drives, on-board audio and BIOS.

Motherboards are designed around these two chips, the Northbridge dictates what kind of CPU’s and memory types are supported, whereas the Southbridge dictates things like the number of built in USB ports and whether or not the board comes with integrated audio, video, RAID, LAN, etc

CPU

The CPU is inserted directly into a socket on the motherboard and is responsible for processing instructions. The types of CPU supported by a motherboard depend on the Northbridge controller chip.

Expansion Slots

The expansion slots on the motherboard allow you to connect external components, such as graphic cards, sound cards, RAID controllers, and other various add-on components. The slots come in varying speeds and some are intended for high speed components only, such as the PCI-E x16 and AGP slots for graphic cards.

Form Factor

Form factor refers to the size and shape of the motherboard i.e. its dimensions. When purchasing a new motherboard you need to be aware of its form factor because certain cases and power supplies only work with certain form factors. The most common form factor is ATX and these days most motherboards are based on the ATX form factor.

Memory

Sticks of memory or RAM are inserted into special memory slots on the motherboard; most motherboards typically have three or four slots. Motherboards typically only support one type of memory e.g. DDR, DDR2, DDR3, Rambus, since the different types have a different number of pins that connect to the slot.

Internal I/O Connectors

These are connections that connect directly to the motherboard from internal components or your computer case. Examples include power connector from power supply, USB, hard drive and fan connections from case, internal SATA connections from hard drives, etc

Back Panel Connectors

These are the connections that you find on the back of your computer case where you plug in a mouse, keyboard, ethernet, printer, etc The number and type of connections is dependent on the motherboard you purchase which mostly depends on the Southbridge chipset used in the motherboard.

BIOS

The BIOS is a small chip on your motherboard that initializes and prepares hardware on boot, so software can communicate with it. If the BIOS cannot initialize a hardware device it will send a special sequence of beeps to your computers’ internal speaker that tells you which device is not installed or configured correctly.

Most, if not all BIOS’s can be updated via special program from your motherboard manufacturer. The reason to update the BIOS is to fix hardware compatibility bugs, or to enable support for newer hardware, such as newer CPU’s based on the same or very similar architecture. If everything in your system is working fine, do not update your BIOS, you don’t want to chance an error occurring during a flash and the resulting hassle of fixing it.

Some Special/Unique Features

Ultra Durable

Some motherboards use newer solid-state capacitors that are less likely to leak or become defective. This is a relatively new feature and is nice to have if you can find it.

Advanced Cooling

Some motherboards add extra heat sinks to certain chips on the motherboard as well as a heat pipe for the north bridge; this allows the motherboard to run a bit cooler and is useful if you want to heavily over-clock your system.

Over-clocking enhanced

The motherboard, through the BIOS or a Windows application, provides fine-tune tweaking in regards to over-clocking. This type of feature isn’t essential for over-clocking, most motherboards’ BIOS provide some fundamental options that are used for over-clocking; this feature just provides more convenience and options to do so.

Dual Channel Memory

This feature allows you to install a pair of memory sticks in specially marked memory slots. This allows twice as much data to be sent from the memory to the memory controller, so it gets executed by the CPU faster. This feature will not double your speed, but may provide performance improvements with certain applications and hardware configurations, so keep an eye out for it. Also, this feature isn’t dependent on the memory sticks themselves, just get a pair of the same memory and it should work in the motherboard.

Example of a motherboard specs To get yourself familiar with looking at motherboard specs, go through the spec sheet of the Gigabyte DS3L motherboard.

How to pick out a motherboard? Now that you have an idea of what constitutes a motherboard, you’re almost ready to start looking for one. Today you can buy motherboards for under or around a $100 that are top notch, the catch is these boards usually don’t come with features like on-board RAID, advanced cooling, dual PCI-E x16, etc, but for most people these features will never get used, so save your money and opt for boards without them, unless you know you are going to use them.

Try to find motherboards that come with some on-board functionality such as on-board audio, USB ports, on-board LAN and SATA connections. Most boards, even the cheapest should have these features by now. Once you have an idea of what you need on your motherboard, just search around and make a list of some candidates. Once you have it narrowed down it is important that you do some pre-emptive problem finding. Your goal is to know the motherboard and all major issues with it before you buy it, you don’t want to wait until you get slapped in the face with some major issue. An easy way of finding problems related to a motherboard is reading through negative comments and just using Google or whatever search engine to conduct searches like this "Gigabyte DS3L problems".