What is a Computer Motherboard?

"Hi, I'm Allen and welcome to Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to build your very own Personal Computer. Right now, I'm going to discuss a little bit further into the components and break it down a little bit further telling you what components you really need to get the system up and running, but really to discuss the component itself. First, let me talk about the motherboard. Obviously, the motherboard is the mother of the ship. It runs everything. It's the main processing central unit that brings everything together. You really need this to make the system work. Now, motherboards come in all shapes and sizes, styles, different speeds, memory and different connectors on it. There's a lot of different brands out there. Some brands, as always are better than others. I will tell you from personal experience, I've had a lot of luck with Abit brand, Gigabyte brand, ECS was really good. One of the lower cost brands is BioStar and I really haven't had problems with them. Azeus is another really, really good brand. You'll see one's like that, and you'll also see companies like ChainTech, Shuttle, MSI and these are a bit lower quality brand so if you're really looking to save money, or just trying to build a cheap system to do whatever, word processing, just surf the internet, that's probably the way to go. Just do some research behind it, but if you're really looking to do some high end stuff, really look into it. Look at what the upgrade features are, what the features on the board are. I just picked up, after doing about two months of doing research behind the Intel Quad Core and I actually picked up this, which is the 965P-DS3 from Gigabyte. It runs the quad core, but it has such awesome specs on it and you have a lot of leeway with over clocking things and it's a really good board. The board itself was about $150 or so when I picked it up. It depends on what you want to spend, what you want to do. Definitely do some research, see what other people say. The best thing out there really is to read customer reviews. Those reviews will hopefully make up your mind at what you want to buy and what you want to spend. That's pretty much it for a motherboard right there."