These pages in the Knowledge area break down each component inside the PC in order to give you a general history of its advances and its purpose inside the computer.

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The Motherboard

Anatomy of a motherboard:

Motherboards come in many form factors: AT, Baby AT, ATX, Mini ATX, etc. The form factor of the board will determine the type of case and power supply that can be connected to it. An AT motherboard simply will not fit in and ATX case with an ATX power supply.

The motherboard is the largest part in the PC. It holds the important components that, once assembled, make a computer. It holds the CPU, the system BIOS, the memory, the controllers for drives, the slots for adding the video, sound, modem and other PCI devices. There are serial and parallel ports in the back, as well as PS / 2 ports for keyboards and mice.

Major Manufacturers
Abit	Asus	Gigabyte
Intel	PC Chips

Expansion busses:

The two main buses in modern motherboards are the PCI and AGP. The PCI slots are white and can be used to connect anything in the form of a PCI card. The AGP is dedicated to the graphics. This inset brown slot is above the white PCI slots and holds video cards. You may occasionally see an ISA slot, which is long and black and located below the PCIs.

The BIOS:

The Basic Input Output System is a tiny program that resides on an EPPROM chip on the motherboard. This program is independent from the hard drive, so all information needed to run the computer is stored on this tiny chip. It holds the information to initialize the input devices, the drives and the video. This program can be updated by "flashing" the BIOS, which basically means overwriting the current program with a new program provided by the BIOS manufacturer. If this procedure is done incorrectly, or if you lose power during the upgrade, the computer may never boot again.

The BIOS will issues a sound code when there is a serious problem and the BIOS cannot complete the POST (Power ON SELF TEST). Read here for those codes.

Considerations:

When buying a motherboard, you must consider the CPU you will run in that system. An AMD processor will not fit on a Pentium motherboard.

Try to buy a board with many of the I/O's included, such as onboard USB and IEEE1392 ports, modem and possibly sound and graphics. many people want to add their own sound and graphics according to their needs. Just remember, whatever you can get onboard, the less PCI slots you'll take up. There is nothing more frustrating than wanting to add a component to your PC and not having an available PCI slot.