FAQs on PCs (Part2:Motherboards)

For the second part of this series of articles regarding the FAQs about PCs, I would like to write about the Motherboard. The motherboard is the component that connects all of the other components of the system that you are building like the Video card, memory modules and your drives. The motherboard plays a very vital role in a system’s overall performance; it can make or break a PC.

 

“What kind of motherboard should I get?”

 

 Well, the type of motherboard that you should buy depends really on what kind of processor you have chosen. And as I said earlier, you should always decide on what chip you will be using before buying a motherboard for your PC. Now, if you have bought a let’s say an AMD Sempron 2200+ which is a socket A chip and requires a FSB of 333MHz then you’ll need a motherboard that can comply with that requirement. The second thing that you should be considering is whether you are planning to upgrade your system, let’s say you have plans to upgrade your RAM when you have the money to buy one or let’s say you are planning to install more hard disk drives in it. Then, you’ll need a motherboard that can accommodate all of these upgrades. If you’re planning to add more RAM later, then you should buy a Motherboard that has enough RAM slots in it. Or if you are planning to buy a better graphics card that runs on 8x AGP, then you’ll need to buy a board that can support that feature.

 

 I would recommend that you list down all of the peripherals that you are planning to add to your system like printers, speakers, scanners, projectors, infrared device adaptors, external modem, mouse and keyboard. You should make sure that you have enough universal serial bus (USB) or serial slots for these. 

 

 There are so many things that you’ll need to consider in buying a board for your PC. There are boards that has built-in video graphics array (VGA) that uses a certain amount of your RAM for video purposes. There are also boards that have built-in modems, or local area network (LAN) cards or even Wi-Fi capability.

 

 The good thing with boards nowadays is that most of the time they have everything that you need and there is no need to buy a separate card for say, video or sound. But this is not always good though, some of this built-in features are not always very good like the built-in VGA, well you see since the built-in VGA shares memory from your system RAM, it may greatly decrease your system’s performance since you may have lesser amount of RAM to use for carrying out tasks. Furthermore, if you’re planning to use your PC for extensive gaming, buying a separate graphics card will be your best option.

 

 There are so many board manufacturers out there and there are just so many boards to choose from. So, my tip for you guys is to go visit the manufacturer’s sites first and read about the features and reviews about the board that you are considering and again carefully weigh your options.