Motherboard Basics – What is a motherboard?

The motherboard or system board or logic board is the primary PCB or printed circuit board inside a computer, regardless of whether it’s desktop pc, a server, a Macintosh or Laptop, they all have this in common.

• The motherboard consists of a CPU socket where the CPU or central processing unit fits.
• Memory slots where RAM is installed, xx.Peripheral Slots such as PCIe, PCI and AGP where such items as modems, graphic cards, USB cards, network cards, sounds cards are installed.
• IDE or SATA or ports where the hard drive runs from xx.Power Sockets, normally two, these run from the power supply.
• Core circuitry such as the chipset which is hard coded into the chipset, this tells the motherboard how to run, at what speed to run, how to recognize which components have been fitted to the motherboard.

Motherboard sizes actually adhere to physical sizes for example An ATX motherboard is 12 x 9.6 inches, Micro ATX 9.6 x 9.6 inches, Flex ATX 9 x 7.5 inches, Mini ATX 6.7 x 6.7 inches.

The sizes above were put together as an industry standard so that when we purchase a computer case, simply make sure it matches the motherboard size name and you can be sure it will be a precise fit in terms of dimensions, but all with card slot alignment.

As above we talked about RAM and Hardrives, a Hard drive simply stores your information when it is not being used.

RAM or Random Access Memory on the other hand is temporary storage.

When you load an application or file the operating system looks for the file on the hard drive, then loads it into the RAM so you can view, modify or copy the file, when you save or close the file it then gets stored back on the hard drive.

The difference between hard drive and ram storage Hard drive storage is slower than RAM storage, but hard drive storage is permanent, RAM storage is temporary, once you power off your pc, your hard drive will retain everything on it, anything stored in RAM on the other hand is deleted as it can only hold data when the computer is powered on.

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