PC Motherboard

As a kid, perhaps you enjoyed putting together model cars or airplanes. Some people grow up and still like the challenge of buying plastic airplane parts and trying to create something that resembles the picture on the front of the box. Some people move on to woodworking, risking life and limb in an attempt to turn harmless pieces of wood into furniture. Others end up covered in grease while restoring an old car, spending more money than they would on a shiny new model. It’s the urge to create, and the instinct has been around since before our ancestors did cave paintings in France. Now some of us have a new hobby, buying a box of computer parts and bringing to life one of the most fascinating creations ever envisioned.

A Fast Trip Through the Motherboard Landscape

These days, it’s gotten much easier for a person to put together a new PC from a set of components, thanks to improvements in technology and the availability of helpful guides on the Internet. Bringing a new computer to life can still provide that same thrill and sense of accomplishment, since building your own PC is really an opportunity to do system design engineering. Choosing the right components and carefully configuring the system can create a perfectly balanced (and cost-effective) computer architecture.
While the latest, sexy CPU’s receive all the attention, it’s really the motherboard that brings it all together to turn a processor into a personal computer. Let’s take a look at the way desktop motherboard and processor technologies have evolved these last few years, focusing on the system issues facing the designers of screaming-fast CPU’s. We’ll take a processor-neutral approach and try to give the reader some tools for making an objective evaluation of systems based on Cyrix, Intel, or AMD processors. We’ll explain the various components on today’s motherboards, including some new initiatives that have dramatically simplified the motherboard upgrade ritual.
It would take an entire article to properly cover the (somewhat controversial) overclocking methodology, but we’ll touch briefly on this topic in the context of what we learned about motherboard parameters. We’ll then test-drive this new system knowledge by making brief case studies of some motherboards that accommodate the newest processors. These motherboards were selected to highlight various architectural differences, and do not represent our endorsement of particular products. In our last section, we’ll talk about what the future holds for motherboard architectures.
Before we plunge into the intricacies of the motherboard itself, first we need to take a little time to understand general computer architecture. That will help us later as we describe some of the new motherboard technologies.