Motherboards

[techp]

I know nothing about motherboards.

How to choose one?

What motherboards supports overclocking?

Types of motherboards?

And everything else.

[WoodenMarker]

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

What cpu?

 

AMD, Intel, IBM, ARM?

 

What socket?

 

What other parts?

 

Whats your budget?

[Blind X]

Motherboards come in four standard sizes: Micro ITX, Micro ATX, ATX and E-ATX.

 

When you're building a PC it's best to use regular ATX for expandability and upgradability of the system, unless you want a small PC, then you have to decide whether it can be a Micro ATX one or a smaller Micro ITX.

 

Then you have chipsets: 

Intel: (CPUs with "K" at the end of the name) you need to use "Z" chipset to allow overclocking, eg; Z97 for LGA 1150 socket and Z170 for LGA 1151 socket. Socket 2011-3 uses X99 chipset. Locked CPUs such as i5-6500, i3-4170 etc use either H or B chipset, so for instance H97/B85 for LGA 1150 and H170 or B150 for LGA 1151.

 

From AMD side there are two sockets as for today:

1. FM2+ - it's for Athlons and APUs, it's a chipset for rather lower-end CPUs such as Athlon X4 880K or A10-7890K, same rule when it comes to size applies here, as for chipsets, chipset A88X is the best for FM2+ and usually you use that one. The rest of the chipsets for FM2+ are not really worth it.

2. AM3+ - It's for the FX-series CPUs line. Motherboards for the FX series need a proper power delivery system called "VRMs"-Voltage Regulator Modules, they need to have good cooling to support FX-6 and FX-8 series CPUs, which draw quite a bit of power.

What VRMs are and how they look like you'll find out here:

What you need to know for AM3+ socket is that 1. only full ATX boards are worth buying, 2. they need to have 8+2 Power Phase VRMs for the 8-core FX and 6+2 for the 6-core FX, 3. they need to have good cooling on the power-delivery system in form of radiators:

 

They look like on the picture above. The beefier, the better. For Intel motherboards I recommend using MSI or ASRock (ASUS and Gigabyte are good too, but they're usually more expensive for the same features), for AMD the brand doesn't matter, all it needs to have is proper cooling and power delivery. Usually not MSI though, they do inferior stuff for AMD in terms of mobos.

 

Last but not least is Multi-GPU support. You need to check what GPU OP has/wants to have or what you will choose for him and choose the motherboard accordingly in terms of Crossfire (AMD) or/and SLI (Nvidia) certification.

 

And don't get overly expensive, fancy-looking motherboards. They don't improve performance. Get minimum that you need to have in the motherboard and pack the most money possible into the GPU and CPU.

[techp]

39 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

What cpu?

 

AMD, Intel, IBM, ARM?

 

What socket?

 

What other parts?

 

Whats your budget?

I'm not building a PC now. I want to learn all about the hardware and then in the future build a PC.

[Electronics Wizardy]

37 minutes ago, Blind-X said:

Motherboards come in four standard sizes: Micro ITX, Micro ATX, ATX and E-ATX.

Ha no.

 

BTX

DTX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_form_factor

39 minutes ago, Blind-X said:

From AMD side there are two sockets as for today:

How about am1?