Alternatively referred to as the mb, mainboard, mobo, mobd, backplane board,base board, main circuit board, planar board, system board, or a logic boardon Apple computers. The motherboard is a printed circuit board that is the foundation of a computer, located at the bottom of the computer case. It allocates power to the CPU, RAM, and all other computer hardware components. Most importantly, the motherboard allows hardware components to communicate with one another.
Below is a picture of the ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard with names of each major component of the motherboard. Clicking on the image below gives you a larger more detailed version of the picture below.
Motherboard components
Below are links to pages with more details for each of the above mentioned motherboard components. Links are listed in clockwise order going from the top-left corner of the image. Components not listed above or found on other motherboards are listed in the next section.
- Expansion slots (PCI Express, PCI, and AGP)
- 3-pin case fan connectors
- Back pane connectors
- Heat sink
- 4-Pin (P4) power connector
- Inductor
- Capacitor
- CPU Socket
- Northbridge
- Screw hole
- Memory slot
- Super I/O
- Floppy connection
- ATA (IDE) disk drive primary connection
- 24-pin ATX power Supply connector
- Serial ATA connections
- Coin cell battery (CMOS backup battery)
- RAID
- System panel connectors
- FWH
- Southbridge
- Serial port connector
- USB headers
- Jumpers
- Integrated circuit
- 1394 headers
- SPDIF
- CD-IN
Other motherboard components
Below is a listing of other motherboard components that are not shown in the picture above or were part of older computer motherboards.
- BIOS
- Bus
- Cache memory
- Chipset
- Diode
- Dip switches
- Electrolytic
- Fuse
- Game port and MIDI header
- Internal speaker
- Keyboard controller
- LCC
- Network header
- Obsolete expansion slots (AMR, CNR, EISA, ISA, VESA)
- Obsolete memory slots (SIMM)
- Onboard LED
- Parallel port header
- PS/2 header
- Resistor
- RTC
- Serial port header
- Screw hole aka mounting hole
- SCSI
- Solenoid
- Voltage regulator
- Voltage regulator module (VRM)
Motherboard form factors
As computers advanced, so have motherboards. Below is a listing of the various motherboard form factors and additional information about each of these form factors including ATX, the most commonly used motherboard form factor today.
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