This is an archive of past discussions about Motherboard. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
I moved it to PC motherboard and added some stuff about expansion card slots. --drj
It's not redirecting yet
Suggestions
This text (now deleted --drj) is far too Intel/PC specific. The term "motherboard" isn't even specific to computers, much less PCs. It's good info, though, so I'd like to put it somewhere. Suggestions? --Lee Daniel Crocker
Fiber Optic Lithography
Does anyone know how this works? I try google it, but all the info are too technical for me. I like getting technical, but is there some good overview references for this?
--Ramu50 (talk) 20:03, 29 May 2008 (UTC)
mobo
I think the term "mobo" is a slang term that enthusiasts and overclockers and isn't an official term use by IT technician. User:Ramu5019:32, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
The PS1 isn't what I think of when I think of motherboards... Maybe a better pic of, I dunno, some generic ATX board?
Logicboard
Used to be a specific page on a Mac's motherboard... now it redirects to this page. What the hell. A logicboard is Mac-specific, and is NOT the same thing. Can we fix this?
Dude This article Sucks
Can you please list the Parts of a motherboard?
I'd do it, if that wasn't the same reason I looked at this page. Could someone list and describe the parts of a motherboard? Jgamekeeper21:52, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
i know what you mean. I have found a good diagram on a search engine, but it took me ages to find, i would put it up although i wasn't sure about copyright. fwed66 15:32, 31 May 2006 (gmt)
If you are looking for more information on PC motherboards, see PC motherboard. It doesn't make sense to list parts or post diagrams, because every motherboard is built and laid out differently. At the PC motherboard article, you will find a description of the connectors and other modules typically included. Aguerriero (talk)15:57, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree that the anti-PC bias of some editors interferes with the quality of this section. I disagree with the dissenters against the open-architecture revolution of the PC. Everyone with an interest in motherboards is thinking about PC motherboards. Besides, the arrangements are not essential to the basic parts listings. ALL motherboards have CPUs, RAM, GPUs (graphics), buses (PCI, IDE), hard drives, PSU's (power), etc. But this motherboard article should emphasize the PC (contrary to the Apple/Mac supporters opinions) because that is what everyone thinks of when they turn their attention to motherboards; the general stuff should have their own articles and be referenced by this one (and by a non-PC article as well) as each subject arises. Don't stand in the way of the majority who are interested in the PC motherboard when they search "motherboard" on this site. --Landen9903:13, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
what's the difference
what's the difference between a motherboard and a processor or CPU?
-trent
Well, a motherboard is a printed circuit board that has a CPU on it. The CPU is what actually does the 'work' in the machine. Huge difference.--Eddie22:54, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
the motherboard contains the CPU, a chipset (all other chips on the motherboard besides the CPU) and ports for various devices to plug in to. (example: RAM slots, PCI slots, USB ports)
why is it called 'mother' board and not 'father' board
Yes it called the MOTHER BOARD simply because mather in natural sense, is the one that gives or gave birth to small and big.
therefore the name mother board is best suitable to that device also known as (Inter-connecting assemly). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 196.220.17.14 (talk) 18:44, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
More information Needed, Please expand this article
Specific parts o the motherboards, and what they do. How important a mother board is in terms of spead and stability to a pc. In general this page just needs a lot more information.
KISS
Keep It Simple Stupid - explaining what a motherboard is is fine, but the article ought to keep that short and focus on what a motherboard does
With that in mind, since the 'Form Factor' information is on the PC_motherboard page, is it necessary to put it on this page? Likewise, most of the links should be moved there if they're not already there. Slothie17:24, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
A picture of boxes?
I strongly suggest that the 'Motherboards for sale' picture is removed. This blurry picture of boxes on a shelf brings absolutely no value to this article what so ever. Same for the blurry heatsink.
There's a huge overlap between these two articles... they're both focused on standardized PC motherboards anyway. Any opinions? Moxfyre21:30, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
There shouldn't be so much of an overlap. I think that excessive PC stuff should be gutted out of Motherboard, which should deal with motherboards more generically and point people interested in PCs at PC motherboard for more details. I think the two articles serve different purposes and should be separate. --DanielRigal12:02, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
I agree with DanielRigal - don't merge, but keep PC motherboard about PC motherboards and this article about motherboards in general. --Zilog Jones23:02, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
I, too, feel that in principle there should be an article specifically about "PC" motherboards, and another about motherboards/mainboards in general. But in practice the existence of two separate articles seems mainly to be causing confusion and redundancy. You'll see that pretty much only the introductory paragraphs of this article are general, while the rest specific to the types of motherboards used on commodity x86 systems. I see a few problems with this:
"PC motherboard" is an anachronistic term nowadays, and the current pair of articles doesn't do a good job of explaining what it means as a subset of motherboards in general. "PC" used to mean "IBM-compatible" but today IBM no longer makes desktop or notebook systems. I would personally prefer the term "Commodity x86 motherboard", since that will include Intel Macs, AMD Sun workstations, and all manner of servers in standard tower cases. These systems use motherboards in the ATX form factor, take standard memory modules, and include the standard PCI and PCI-Express buses... basically what I'm getting at is that many computers that we don't think of as "PCs" now use motherboards that are virtually identical to those used in "PCs".
There's not a whole lot of information available on other types of motherboards, which were generally only available from a single vendor. There's a plethora of information on PC motherboards going back to the original IBM PC: what kind of processors they took, what chipsets were used, what expansion slots were available, what buses were used on-board. But it's a lot harder to find info on old 68k/PPC Mac boards, or SPARC boards, or NeXT boards, etc. If someone has a good source of this information I'd love to see it show up in this article.
I see the point, and propose another solution (at the end of this paragraph). Motherboard references now assume reference to the PC, especially when discussing motherboard architecture. Here are my two arguments: 1) The motherboard is accepted as following the PC standard, unless indicated otherwise, 2) Most of those interested in learning about the motherboard intend to make decisions regarding it. Mac (Apple) motherboards are closed architecture, thus killing any need to learn about them, except for the occasional college computer science student. My solution and recommendation is as follows: The "motherboard" article should explicitly assume reference to the PC motherboard, and the side article should be called "non-PC motherboards". --Landen9903:00, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
Please note that the 1Q 2006 Mac market share is 3.6% in the US and 2% in the world [1]. This seems to imply that over 96% of the American population uses the PC .. surely the actual percentage is VERY high. I doubt things have changed much in a year and a half, and I expect that only a small percentage of MAC users even care what a motherboard is. This wiki project is to be the encyclopedia of the people, and therefore is to cater to their languages, ideas, and interests.
I've made some fairly extensive changes to try to generalize the article beyond PC-specific stuff. Added more info on the function and components of a mobo, a history section, and a bunch of visual cleanup and moving things around. What do people think of it? Moxfyre04:00, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
The number of manufacturers listed in the info box is getting out of hand. Does anyone know what the TOP THREE mobo manufacturers are in terms of volume? I am guessing Foxconn, Asus, Intel, but not sure. Anyone have info on that? Thanks! MOXFYRE (contrib) 14:35, 1 June 2007 (UTC)
I would wager Asus, Foxconn, and Gigabyte. Intel does not manufacture motherboards; IIRC the Intel-branded boards are made by Foxconn. — Aluvust/c03:39, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
"The modern ASRock K7VT4A Pro motherboard"
(See image subline) Are you sure that this motherboard is modern? AFAICS it does not have any PCI-E slots and seems to be rather old. -- 80.138.80.10522:21, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I picked it for labeling since the quality and angle of the photo is excellent. If anyone can get me a similarly good freely-available photo, I'll make a labeled version of that. MOXFYRE (contrib) 21:59, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Merge
There has been a tag on PC motherboard to merge with this article since March 2007, but no corresponding tag here. I placed one and will wait for opinions -- the merge seems like a good idea to me, if a lot of work to get the two articles integrated. -- phoebe/(talk) 05:21, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
I think it is clear that it is a bad idea as we need an article about motherboards generically and a separate one about PC motherboards. It was already discussed and no merge took place so I am taking the tag off both articles. However, I do agree that the Motherboard article overlaps badly and needs to be made much more generic.--DanielRigal08:20, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Ok, well PC motherboard should be mentioned in the first paragraph then as an example. I don't think most non-specialists know there is such a thing as a non-PC motherboard, and it is not at all clear from either article. cheers, phoebe/(talk) 23:22, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Or rather, to clarify, I think most non-specialist would read "PC motherboard" as "computer motherboard" -- so since the motherboard article is, in fact, about computer motherboards it's confusing. Does that make sense? This might be a case when we should consider the audience -- people who might not know what a motherboard is at all will come here for information. Coming across PC motherboard, I wouldn't realize there was a more generic article unless I happened to see the link in the first line, since the first paragraph is so general. I'm not sure how to fix this up. -- phoebe/(talk) 23:26, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Outside of personal computers, does any care or talk about what the motherboard's form factor might be? i.e. "Nice Cray -- what form factor are you using?" Ewlyahoocom21:27, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Update mobo pictures
Given the prevalence of PCI-e, RAID, and SATA technologies, I'm thinking that illustrated pictures of motherboards should probably also illustrate those technologies too. --Landen9903:03, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
File:ASRock K7VT4A Pro Mainboard Labeled English.pngThis is the labeled picture I want to replace. Can anyone take a high-res image of a recent mobo from the same angle? -MoxfyreWell, there's already one picture of a modern mobo: the Abit IN9 32X SLI... I would love to remake the labeled photograph with a modern motherboard, but I don't have any high-quality images of newer motherboards from the appropriate angle. If anyone has a good camera and can take an image from the same angle as the current one, I'll make a new labeled version immediately. MOXFYRE (contrib) 03:16, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
Delete Page and Start Over??
This entire article should be wiped and started over with a clear distinction of a generic motherboard/daughterboard and PC Motherboard. Common usage today dictates that a motherboard is a Personal Computer motherboard, either PC or Apple. In general, because Apple is not (or was not) open source, when you talked about buying a motherboard, everybody understood you to mean a PC (WinTel) motherboard. But in light of the purpose of this site, the actual term for clarity should be PC Motherboard with a simple link on this Motherboard page.
I added a bit of PC history leading the the motherboard industry and the EATX form factor but that is obviously PC specific.
Delete and start over!? Good heavens, why? There is a lot of useful information on this page, no sense in throwing it away. The lack of information on non-PC has been discussed several times on this Talk Page. Basically, there's not much information about them available... they aren't commodity hardware, so there are fewer models and fewer motherboards in user, and the chipsets and components used aren't very well publicized. If you have specific ideas for how to rearrange or clarify the article, or information about non-PC mobos to contribute, then by all means say so. But throwing away the content in this article is just silly. MOXFYRE (contrib) 23:55, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
Sexist?
From the SiSoftware Sandra FAQ[2]: Q: Why do you use "mainboard" and not "motherboard"? A: "Motherboard" is considered sexist, and thus non PC (Politically Correct). The correct term these days is "mainboard". Funnily (or not so funnily) in the following question they reproduce a bunch of truly sexist clichés. But I wonder what exactly is supposed to be sexist about motherboard? Is it OK to use?--87.162.28.243 (talk) 14:54, 12 May 2008 (UTC)
"Mother" is a specifically female word. To that extent, the term is vaguely sexist. Ditto for "daughtercard", which is a less common term (fairly rare in the computer world anymore). I don't think anyone is actually offended by either term, but I could be wrong. "Mainboard" has no gender-related connotation whatsoever. Regardless, "motherboard" is the more common term. In the United States, "mainboard" is a pretty uncommon term; I get the impression that it may be more frequently used in Europe. — Aluvust/c01:11, 13 May 2008 (UTC)
I do believe that Motherboard was named because most of the "required" components are "female" components. (female means receive, in electronics.) E.g. CPU, RAM, BUS (I/O are required components so you can't count that). 19:28, 27 May 2008 (UTC)
