Selecting a New Motherboard A Beginner’s Guide
1. Socket type: What socket identify does your mainframe require? A 775 for Intel Pentiums? Perhaps a 939 AMD. Start to narrowing your activity with this most base criteria, matched motherboard socket to CPU.
2. Form factor: The commission has to good your case. The filler of the commission is its “form factor”. An ATX modify bourgeois housing module accept 12×9.6 progress boards. But a microATX requires boards no large than 9.6×9.6. Please state that whatever of the small boards crapper be mounted in an ATX case.
3. RAM: You’ll belike acquire a commission that uses PC3200 RAM. But be alive that whatever senior boards ease on the mart call themselves “PC3200 capable” but crapper exclusive ingest it in up to digit banks. Also, whatever boards exclusive hit digit slots, kinda than the more ordinary sort of three. If you requirement to separate 3 GB of RAM, for extremity mettlesome play, you’ll requirement a three-slot board.
4. Front Speed Bus: It’s an oversimplification to feature this sort is the pace aggregation passes finished your motherboard, but it’s a beatific sufficiency definition for our purposes. Faster is better, but ready in nous that pace is money, if you’re on a budget. The tops on AMD supported systems is a whopping 2000MHz.
5. Video and good on the motherboard: Do you poverty these digit items shapely into the board, or would you kinda acquire game and block them in? Video on the motherboard is commonly adequate, unless you’re a gamer. In that housing you’ll poverty to forgo it in souvenir of the incoming feature.
6. AGP port: Gamers, recording editors, 3-D animators, every poverty the prizewinning graphics bill they crapper get, so they order an Accelerated Graphics Port. Most every boards hit them, but attain trusty they module appendage 8X or meliorate speed, if you’ve got your hunch ordered on a rattling alacritous card.
7. PCI slots: How whatever slots module you requirement for things same modems, getting cards, and the like? Some of the microATX boards become with exclusive two, which haw be inadequate. I souvenir boards with 4 or more slots, gift plentitude of treatment capability.
8. Firewire: If you dispense and modify video, 1394 IEEE, otherwise famous as firewire, is a necessity. If a commission you’re considering doesn’t hit it, amount on using digit of your PCI slots for a card.
After you’ve absent finished these octad items, you should be substantially on the artefact to making your selection.
Michael Quarles is the communicator of Building a PC for Beginners.
Tags: 1394 IEEE, agp, firewire, form factor, front speed bus, PCI, RAM, socket, video