Motherboards
The
Motherboard is heart of the computer, with all
of it's
connections leading out from itself and into every device in the
machine. A variety of books that where looked at for reference have all agreed
on one
fact about the motherboard, and that is the fact that it is the main
printed circuit
board inside the machine in
question, when you open a PC that
much is obvious as the Motherboard will more than likely cover the whole of one
side of the PC. According to Shelley O'Hara (Author of The Complete Idiots
Guide to Buying and Upgrading PC's) the motherboard is 'a big, flat circuit
board that covers the entire floor of the PC casing.'
The Motherboard is a very important part of the
system since everything has to be connected to it, everything therefore has to
be compatible with it. Also the
speed of the connections that run from each
component to the motherboard can have a positive or negative effect on the
system in question. Ian Sinclair (Author of Build and Upgrade Your Own PC) says
' The motherboard design fixes the maximum speed of CPU that you can use.' I
will explain what this means in the section dedicated to the CPU.