The Motherboard

The motherboard can be thought as the skeleton of your computer. It is what connects all your modules together. The CPU, GPU, CD-Drives, RAM, Power Supply, HDD, all connect to it. Without the motherboard, the computer would have no way in functioning.

There are two types of motherboard on the market right now, AMD and Intel based motherboards. There is very little difference between these two, other than their compatibility with each chipset. If you have a Intel CPU, then you must have a motherboard that supports the correct socket. For example, the Intel Core i5-4670K Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1155 will only work with motherboards that support Intel LGA 1155 sockets, and a AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz Socket AM3+ will only work with motherboards that support AM3+ sockets. (I’ll go more in depth with what all those wacky tech terms I just listed when I discuss what a CPU is).

Regarding all the other modules, it will work with either an AMD and Intel based motherboard, except when it comes to add-on cards such as a graphics card and/or sound card. Add-on cards are dependent if the motherboard supports the correct PCI (a standard for connecting computers and their peripherals) slots. There are some modules that connect using PCI slots and I’ll discuss of those later.

If you look up motherboards on the market, you will get pages and pages of different kinds of motherboards. That is because each motherboard have a feature unique to their model in order to be compatible with all the modules that attach to it. Also there are many different manufacturers that create motherboards. Just like how there are many different cell phone companies that make smart phones. The motherboard should be one of the components considered last because it is the compatibility checker.

    

      (AMD Motherboard) (Intel Motherboard)

As you can see, there physically is very little difference between these two motherboards. The main difference is the CPU sockets which is the rectangle shaped platforms.