How to Buy a Motherboard

Video Transcript

"My name is James, computer hardware training coordinator for InterConnection, and I'm going to show you how to buy a motherboard. What we have here is an Asus motherboard. It takes the Athlon processor. This will support the 64-bit processors, which are a little faster than the 32s. Now when you're buying a motherboard, there are a few things you want to keep in mind. The big thing is: what are you going to use it for? If you're a person that likes to have a lot of audio and you want to have all the toys and your iPod plugged in and everything, you might want to get one that's got a few more slots. These little PCI slots or PCI express slots will allow you to add more features to your motherboard. If you want a TV capture card, if you want a really big sound card, if you want to have a surveillance card; no matter what you want to put in here, you're going to need slots. You're going to need somewhere to install it. Now on some of these, they'll have little cards like this. This card doesn't need a slot. It has a little spot to plug in on the motherboard. You might want to look for this when you're buying them, too, just to save money later on. Why buy a card if it comes with something that works. Now, the next thing you're going to want to do is find out what type of hard drives you're going to be using. If you're just building something for your kids and you want to use the old hard drive you have that's IDE, then you really don't need these serial ATA connectors. These come in different speed ratings, too. So you want to take a look at different manufacturers. Check out the reviews on the motherboards. Some are built better than others. You also want to check out how much RAM it can handle. All motherboards have a limit on the max. amount of RAM. You want to make sure you have something that can take as much as you put in, but you don't want to overpay for buying a motherboard that can take more RAM than you need. My recommendation: read the reviews online. Hard OCP is a good example. And of course, just doing some searches with the motherboard model and of course, type in review at the end. And you'll get some good reviews. All motherboards you buy are going to come with a few things. They're going to come with a manual, a backing plate. Big thing to keep in mind is you need a case that can accommodate this. Most older cases can handle this. It just pops right in the back, and you can use your motherboard easily. Now if you're trying to install this in a lot of manufacturer's cases, some of those are a little different. So you want to make sure whatever case you're going to put in will accept the motherboard. Most use an ATX form factor, and this really shouldn't be too big of a problem. One final thing to keep in mind when you're buying your motherboard is make sure that the connector for the power supply fits your power supply, and any existing cards you have, you also want to makes sure that they have the right ports on the motherboard. So my name is James. I'm computer hardware training coordinator for InterConnection, and I just showed you how to buy a motherboard."