How do I order a custom motherboard?

[MC.Morrado]

I am currently trying to get a custom Micro-ATX motherboard made for my experiments, mostly related to studying computer science in my spare time a little more everyday. Having the PCB itself be purple would be cool. The goal of this motherboard is to be a drop-in replacement for an old Micro-ATX gaming motherboard I've been tinkering around with.

 

So far I am looking to have this custom motherboard use a decent RISC-V system-on-chip in the same spot that a normal socketed X86 CPU would go. This may be a bit odd but finding an AMD GPU from a gaming laptop to solder onto the PCB myself is part of the project.

[Needfuldoer]

Do you have Gerber files ready to go to have the board manufactured?

[MC.Morrado]

1 minute ago, Needfuldoer said:

Do you have Gerber files ready to go to have the board manufactured?

I'm afraid not. What are those?

[Kilrah]

If you have to ask... you're probably a few years of learning and/or a few tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars away from making that a reality.

 

Anyone can get PCBs made relatively cheaply these days, but... designing the whole system kinda requires understanding it fully.

 

You can get a risc-v ITX board that runs slower than a Pi if you want https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/milk-v-jupiter-first-itx-risc-v-board-ive-tested

 

Or https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-001?qs=Imq1NPwxi75JBw6ulD0quQ%3D%3D

[Needfuldoer]

5 minutes ago, MC.Morrado said:

I'm afraid not. What are those?

I'm afraid this is one of those "if you have to ask, you're in over your head" situations.

 

Unless you have the electrical engineering knowledge and experience necessary to make a custom board layout, then the capital to have the boards manufactured and populated with components, or are willing to pay a ton of money to have that work done for you, it's not going to happen. Motherboards are complicated, even "simple" ones like a Raspberry Pi that aren't much more than a breakout board for an SoC. There's a lot more to trace layout than "connect pin 1 on chip X to pin 2 on chip Y".

 

Here's just a peek at what's involved in replicating a relatively simple, two-sided, through hole ISA card that already exists:

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

welp good luck designing the thing cause trying to undertake this kinda project pretty much means you are the designer + firmware guy and yeah probably gonna take quite awhile to do it yourself if you even have the knowledge let alone when you dont since all the info is usually behind closed doors

 

the soc should make things alot easier considering you can probably reference the design of a board or sbc around that soc but putting a soldered gpu on it yeah good luck

 

youll probably also have to figure out making the bios, maybe something along the lines of coreboot?

 

i think you are better off modding existing things rather than designing them from scratch

[manikyath]

custom motherboard means:

- designing it yourself, or contracting a PCB design company to do it for you

- ordering samples, either hand-soldering them yourself or having the pcb manufacturer assemble them for you.

- use these samples to fix the bugs you're guaranteed to have

- order new samples, rinse and repeat until all bugs are gone.

- order your production run, presumably factory assembled this time.

 

none of this makes any sense for a one-of, "a decent risc-v cpu" is currently in the early raspberry pi power category of "you can do things on it, and that's cool" and the assuption you may get a laptop GPU to work on risc-v is basicly flat-out wrong if you're at the stage of asking a forum how to have a motherboard manufactured.

 

this isnt the first time i tell you this, so i'm gonna put it a bit more blunt this time: you have big dreams, but you're not gonna make anything happen if you dont start at a level you're able to make happen. making your own risc-v motherboard is not something you're gonna be able to make happen with the knowledge you've shown to have so far.

 

i'm gonna show an example.. the commander x16, it's a labour of love of actual old-timey industry experts, putting together off-the-shelf components into a commodore 64 era computer. they've worked on it for YEARS, and even with the development essentially being paid out of pocket they're selling it for hundreds of dollars a piece, because that's just simply how much a low volume product costs.

[StayThePath]

I'm studying computer science too and I'm hoping to learn to do what you are talking about. Over the winter break I made a 48x16 LED matrix with a little ESP32 single board computer. I don't know if I'll be able to do it, but I eventually want to turn my breadboard version into an actually printed PCB after I work with it a bit more. It's WAY WAY simpler than a motherboard. I'm learning Fusion360 so that I can build a proper enclosure and design the board. There is a picture of what I built below. It was a ton of fun and I love doing this stuff.

I'd recommend starting with something like that. Get one of those Arduino kits off of Amazon or you can start with an ESP32, it's basically the same, an esp32 is more powerful, but in the beginning that doesn't matter much. The Arduino IDE is pretty simple to start with this stuff and it works with ESP32 as well. Even if you don't have the money to do that, checkout tinkerCAD. It's a good place to start learning 3D modeling and circuit design. Last year I made this circuit as well as this 3d model that would theoretically be the circuit. That was basically what the entire class was about, making that circuit and making that 3d model and these are about as simple as it gets. 

My point being, people get paid a lot of money to do the type of thing you are talking about, and it takes a long time to learn to do it. As you see in some of the other comments it's hell of an undertaking, however if you want to do it, YOU CAN. It's just a longer process than you seem to be expecting.  There's nothing wrong with that, just start at the beginning and move forward. I find it super fun and building that silly robot was a blast, as was this matrix. Check out some TinkerCAD videos and find a project to build and go for it. Maybe you can follow a project in tinkercad then buy the parts and actually build it. Just trying to encourage someone to follow through with their interests! Get at me in a few years when you build your motherboard.