What is a motherboard?

 What is a motherboard?

 The motherboard (or mainboard) is the printed circuit designed for interconnecting all the devices of the machine so they can work fully synchronized, without conflicts, and receive the necessary current from the PSU.

Components

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  On a motherboard we can find; microprocessor sockets, memory banks, expansion slots, cooler connections, USB connectors, system clock, power connectors, IDE and/or SATA connectors for storage units, BIOS chip, and battery. We can also find the southbridge (responsible for communicating with the PCI bus, USB connectors, the system clock, power management,, and other devices), and the northbridge (responsible for communication between the processor, the integrated video, PCI-E slots, memories-depending on the model- and the southbridge). It is worth clarifying, today, in modern PC's, many of the tasks performed by the chipset have been moved into the microprocessor, especially the tasks performed by the northbridge. Today, for modern boards, the communication functions and the memory controller are no longer found on the motherboard or northbridge, but in the microprocessor, and only tasks delegated to the southbridge are maintained.

 Platform  The motherboard, processor and memory, form a set called platform, which is divided into two large groups according to the technology it supports: Intel or AMD. Both technologies use LGA sockets, but the architecture of the processors are not compatible with each other, so we must pay special attention at the time of choosing it.

Motherboard Sizes

The most commonly used type of motherboard is ATX. Different types of ATX are; micro-ATX, µATX, mini-ATX, FlexATX, EATX, WATX, nano-ATX, pico-ATX, and mobileATX.

ATX: It is the standard size and the most used in general. 305 x 244 mm standard.
Micro-ATX:  It has gained great popularity when it comes to assembling compact but powerful equipment. Measures: 244 x 244 mm.
Mini-ITX:  It's not the most common, but it is very useful for small pc's. 170 x 170 mm.

Capacities

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 There's a wide variety of models that are categorized, according to their capabilities, into low, medium and high ranges. In short, the high ranges have more features (eg more USB 2.0 connectors, more PCI or PCI-E sockets, higher-quality integrated GPUs), greater support for higher quality drivers and drivers, resulting in a more expensive board. The medium and low ranges have fewer features, lower quality but they are a lot cheaper. The choice would depend on what kind of use will be given to the PC and, of course, the user's budget.