Choosing the MotherBoard

First of all what can i tell you about a motherboard, (if you are not familiar)
A motherboard is the central printed circuit board (PCB) in some complex electronic systems, such as modern personal computers. The motherboard is sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, or, is also sometimes casually shortened to mobo.



Now depending on what CPU you have chosen consider the following Specifications of your motherboard.

The socket type.
The front side bus (FSB).
The memory type and slots.
the peripherals.
Expansion slots such as: PCI,AGP,PCI express and others

Ill show you an image explaining the parts of a motherboard.

This is basically a comun type of motherboard.

Now depending on what you want your computer for, there are many types of motherboards you can choose from. Now the motherboard is one of the most important parts in the computer and you must be really careful when buying one because you need to consider hardware updates. You might have the best computer today, but like i said before, there are new Computer parts almost everyday. That means if you want to upgrade your computer later you need to choose a decent motherboard, and not only the cheapest one.

The socket type
About the socket type. You want to choose a motherboard that can have the same socket type as your CPU, That's the first thing to consider.(assuming you already own a CPU)

The front side bus (Fsb)
The front side bus is another thing to consider when buying a motherboard. That tells you the different "speeds" that your motherboard can handle. Usually all motherboards have different front side bus speeds. EX: 400,800,1066...
It doesn't mean that when you buy a motherboard the front side bus is only 800. AS it can have multiple speeds. You want to buy a motherboard that can handle both the CPU and memory ram at the same speed. This is off course for the best performance and ratio.

Memory type and slots
Another thing to consider is the type of memory your motherboard can have, and how many slots it has. For example: 4 DIMM Ddr2 slots. This tells me that my motherboard can have a maximum of 4 slots, and the type of memory is ddr2.

The peripherals
What is a peripheral?
A peripheral is a device attached to a host computer behind the chipset whose primary functionality is dependent upon the host, and can therefore be considered as expanding the hosts capabilities, while not forming part of the system's core architecture.
Some of the more common peripheral devices are printers, scanners, disk drives, tape drives, microphones, speakers, and cameras. Peripheral devices can also include other computers on a network system.
This is basically what "expansions" you computer can have. Like printers and web cams.

Expansion slots
An expansion slot is what types of graphic cards,sound cards and other, your computer can have. Such as agp,pci,pci express and so on. This tells you what kind of graphic card to have. Motherboards have several expansion slots, so don't worry about if you buy one you can only have one graphic card, or one sound card.

Note that you might want to check if it comes already with an onboard video card and soundcard. Not every motherboard does, but 90% of them do. Always good to double check.

That's pretty much it. Basing on what kind of motherboard and CPU you have the next step is Memory ram!