The Motherboard is the main printed circuit board (PCB) that connects the various array of electrical components, processing chips, and peripherals of the computer.
When you take a glance at a motherboard, the first thing you’d likely notice are all the different kinds of sockets spread throughout the motherboard. These sockets provide the user a proper way to connect different kinds of computer components such as the CPU, memory sticks, peripheral components such as graphics cards or legacy devices, and even the most recent addition of M.2 SSDs. However, these sockets are proprietary not only to the kind of component but the type of socket for the particular kind of component. For example, CPUs are known to have proprietary sockets which differentiates Intel from AMD and the different generations of CPUs. Typically, when computer components evolve throughout newer generations of computing the sockets will be updated and aren’t usually backward compatible with previous generation like the newly released DDR4 memory sticks. I’ll cover CPU sockets, memory slots, and PCI slots in a future article.
Connectors are convenient ways for users to access the features of a motherboard via pass-through components like a computer case. When you install a motherboard in a computer case, you’ll connect the headers for your case’s power switch, reset switch, power LED and hard drive LED indicator lights, HD audio, and USB connectors for the front of your computer case. This allows the user to access these features on the computer case which is rather convenient. Other types of connectors include fan headers, SATA, jumpers, power connections, etc. The fan headers are for your case fans and for the pulse width modulation (PWM) fan for your CPU heat sink which will change fan speeds depending on the configurations you set your PWM CPU fan to function. SATA connections are commonly used for hard drives and optical drives. The jumpers on the motherboard can be used to take temperature readings, set certain functions for your computer, etc. And the power connections are where you’d plug in the 24-pin and 4/8-pin connectors from your power supply to provide power to your computer’s components on the motherboard.
At the back of your motherboard you’ll notice the inputs and outputs (I/O) for your computer peripherals. The typical motherboard I/O will include ports for your RJ45 Ethernet, HD audio via Optical S/PDIF or 7.1 3.5mm jacks, ample amount of USB 2.0/3.0/3.1, video interfaces like HDMI, DVI, and/or display port depending if your platform supports integrated graphics, legacy interfaces like the PS/2 for legacy keyboards or mice, firewire, parallel or serial, and high end features like CMOS reset, Bluetooth and WiFi, external SATA, etc. Your motherboard will also come with an I/O shield to protect the I/O from electrostatic discharge (ESD), dust, or just from looking aesthetically displeasing.
The motherboard is easily the most under-hyped computer component and so I’ll continue to cover more aspects of the motherboard in future Comptia A+ articles.
