Motherboards

The motherboard, or system board, contains the central processing unit (CPU), BIOS, other processing chips, memory, IO device connections, expansion slots, and more. Over the years, the motherboard has increasingly taken more functions from what was historically installed as expansion cards. For example, many computers you buy today have all of your typical input connectors (keyboard, mouse, USB), and added in Firewire (IEEE1394), video, network, audio (input and output), IDE, SCSI, SATA, and more.

The primary purpose of the motherboard is to process instructions from the operating system and applications. The processing is performed by the CPU which we will discuss in the next section. The motherboard stores active information in the memory and facilitates sending data to the hard drives through the drive interface.

Motherboards are not typically considered a field replaceable unit by consumers, but is replaceable by a certified vendor technician. A field replaceable unit is a component which is able to replaced in the field – not requiring the computer be sent in to be repaired. For example, a hard drive is replaceable while a CPU is not.

There are many different motherboard vendors and thousands of different types of motherboards. A motherboard is unique to a certain chipset and family of processor. For example, a vendor might create one motherboard which is compatible with the Intel Socket 370 series of chips and a different motherboard which is compatible with AMD’s AM2 Sempron series of chips.