3. Build Your Own Computer: Choosing the Motherboard

Welcome back to the third installment of building your own computer. You've gotten to the point of choosing the main board or motherboard. The motherboard is the piece of hardware that all the other hardware attaches to. Think of it as a vast communication center allowing talk between the different pieces of the hardware. However, a motherboard may also contain things such as a sound chip, and video chip. These are choices you can make in your decision.

Remember the socket you chose earlier? Well that plays an important roll. You must buy a motherboard that has your socket. Also, you must choose a motherboard that has the features you want. Make sure it has at least 4 RAM DIMM slots and a LAN connector. The RAM slots allow easy expansion of RAM in the future. The LAN connector allows you to network your computers, and in some cases connect to the internet. Almost all motherboards come with onboard sound that is remarkably similar.

The main choice to make with the motherboard once you have gotten past the socket, is what type of video hardware are you going to use. Here you have three choices, integrated, PCI Express, and AGP. I do not ever recommend normal PCI slots. An integrated onto motherboard chip reduces the overall cost of the system, use this if you plan on word-processing without any 3D games, or multimedia editing. All integrated video chips currently on the market offer good 2D performance. Another thing to consider is that the next Windows version "Vista" will probably not play well with integrated chips. Though you're not guaranteed compatibility using a separate video card.

The black slot in the middle of the left picture is a 16x PCI Express slot. The brown slot in the middle of the right picture is an 8x AGP slot. Don't worry about the x (times), all PCI Express now are 16x, and all AGP are 8x in new motherboards.

If you are into gaming or any type of multimedia work you will want an AGP or PCI Express compatible motherboard. You would choose AGP to save money, by using an existing AGP card you have, rather than buying a new PCI Express card. PCI Express offers several advantages over AGP, such as double the bandwidth. However, you will only see performance enhancement when you buy a high end card, because frankly most cards don't need the added bandwidth of PCI Express.

PCI Express is available on Socket AM2, 939, and 775 motherboards only. AGP is available on all of the mentioned sockets, including 939, 775, 754, and 478. If you see the words PCI Express with ATI Crossfire or PCI Express with NVIDIA SLI, this means that this motherboard can run one PCI Express card from any manufacturer, or two cards simultaneously for improved performance. This only works with the said manufacturer, an NVIDIA SLI board only uses two NVIDIA cards, it cannot accept two ATI cards. The opposite is true for Crossfire boards. Although, some boards are able to run combinations of the two, but this is not a given rule, remember to check. However, I don't recommend buying an SLI or Crossfire board, unless you have more money than you know what to do with. When choosing a card only look at ATI or NVIDIA, the rest are, for the most part, not compatible with all programs and offer flaky performance. More information on choosing a video card will be provided in another section.

Finally on a motherboard you have expansion options. Here you decide if you need any legacy PCI slots, or PCI Express expansion slots (which take the place of PCI.) PCI/PCI Express slots can be used to add sound cards, extra ports, and RAM drives. As of now, I recommend at least two PCI slots, and preferably at least one PCI Express expansion slot (in addition to the video card 16x slot) if the socket/chipset support it. Also, you should be certain the board has IDE, and SATA (I or II) ports, these allow you to attach peripherals. This includes Hard drives, and DVD/CD drives.

A good motherboard should cost from $60 USD to $130 USD. Any less and you lose quality, any more and the price/performance ratio is out the window. It is simply not worth the extra money for the few more features you get. (Unless of course you absolutely need them, such as a legacy ISA slot or SCSI controller) The main motherboard manufacturers include Asus, Gigabyte, Shuttle, Soyo, MSI and Soltek. Of course their are many more, but these are ones I have had good experiences with.

See our Chipset and Socket Database to help decide what chipset/socket you should get for your system.

As always read reviews of possible choices and see how they stack up. Type in the model and in your favorite search engine, and have a good look before you decide. Thanks.

Kevin C. August 13th 2005 kcas88@gmail.com

- Updated Apr. 9th 2006

『Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.』