P1 - Motherboard

Mother Board

The motherboard, also called the mainboard, is the part of a computer into which everything connects. Motherboards come in many different sizes; the most common sizes are based on the ATX form factor. Almost every consumer PC today makes use of an ATX or Micro ATX motherboard (305,244mm and 244,244mm respectively). Generally an ATX motherboard has 7 expansion slots while a Micro ATX motherboard has usually got four. There are also some high performance motherboards which use E-ATX and XL-ATX form factors which are larger versions of standard ATX. Using a larger form factor allows you to fit more expansion slots and more chips onto the board, while maintaining the compatibility by using the ATX screw layout.

A motherboard is held in place using small screws called standoffs, the standoffs screw into the case’s motherboard tray and then the motherboard is placed on top of them and then screwed in.

Above is a picture of an ATX motherboard, the Gigabyte Z68 UD7.

1)      These are the expansion slots for adding cards; this motherboard has 6 PCI E slots and one legacy PCI slot. Some examples of expansion cards are: Graphics cards, sound cards, RAID cards, network cards and solid state drive cards. The slot on the far right may be shorter, but it is in fact still a PCI E slot, it is mostly used for sound cards or other cards which only require one PCI lane to run.

2)      This is the motherboards built in I/O, or input output. This has the built in sound jacks, USB and ESATA ports, built in video output and many more types of connection.

3)      This is a heat sink; almost all current motherboards have a heat sink of some kind to cool the components on the board. The pipe which connects each heat sink is a heat pipe, it is filled with a special fluid which helps to conduct the heat. This particular motherboard has a heat sink for the chipset (Z68) and the power phases.

4)      This is the CPU socket where you place the processor.

5)      These are the RAM DIMM slots; this particular mother board has 2 channels of dual channel DDR3.

6)      A-This is the 24pin ATX power connection; this is the motherboards main source of power. Some older motherboards only have a 20pin ATX connecter because they require less power.  

B- This is a 6 pin connection to supply extra power to the CPU, some motherboards have a molex connector instead and some extreme high performance boards have multiple connectors.

7)      These are the SATA connectors where hard drives are attached; they are colour coded to represent which are SATA II and which are SATA III.

SATA II is up to 3 GB/s and is more than enough for any hard drive; SATA III is up to 6 GB/s and is mainly used for connecting high speed solid state drives. On this particular mother board the grey connectors are SATA III running natively from the Z68 chipset, while the white ones are also SATA III, but run from a slower third party chip. The black connectors are SATA II. These colour codes vary depending on which mother board you have.

8)      This motherboard, like many modern boards, has a LED post indicator. Instead of the traditional speaker which would beep a code to tell you what is wrong with the system, the indicator displays a code which you can look up in the motherboard manual.

9)      These are the USB and audio headers on the motherboard, you connect the front panel USB and audio jacks to these headers.