Why you need a good Motherboard - Ports and Features.

By ioplus3 

The MOTHERBOARD is a component that brings all computer parts together. So, when you want to upgrade your computer after a few years of your purchase, how much you can upgrade, depends on ports available on your motherboard. Some special features come with costly motherboards. These features depend on Chipset your Motherboard has. Different Chipsets support different features and how much you pay for a motherboard, limits the features you can have. Don’t worry there are a lot of features an average user does not need to know about and thus I am keeping the list of features limited to important ones.

To boost the speed of your computer in the future, the first thing you want to buy is RAM. So, it is important that how much memory your motherboard can support and how many memory slots does it have. If your motherboard has only two memory slots and you are using only one slot, then you can buy another RAM module of the same specification as your previous one and put it in the empty slot. But if you were using both memory slots, then there is no option to add new memory modules and thus you must replace your RAM Modules entirely with larger capacity modules. This would be a costly option as you would lose money on your old purchased RAM Modules.

I personally prefer to buy motherboards having four memory slots with Memory support up to 32GB DDR4 RAM minimum. That way you get to keep your old RAM modules and add new ones. Going beyond 16GB DDR4 RAM for average user & 32GB DDR4 RAM for High-end Gamers is not preferred as increasing the RAM size beyond the mentioned limits would not do much in terms of performance.

Similarly, if your motherboard has only one graphics slot (PCIe 3.0 x16) you can use only one graphics card. But if your motherboard has two graphics slots (PCIe 3.0 x16) and supports AMD Crossfire & Nvidia SLI, you can add one more graphics card of the same brand. This also depends on compatibility between graphics cards too.

You can ask what AMD Crossfire and Nvidia SLI is. It is the name of the feature AMD & Nvidia gave that to allow video cards to be connected in parallel in order to increase gaming performance. Please note that some graphics cards do not support this feature like Nvidia GTX 1060 do not support SLI. Nvidia NVlink is a new bridge that is required in new generation of cards instead of Nvidia SLI.

Standard budget motherboards have 4 SATA ports, that can easily run out if you keep adding storage to your computer like me. You would want to have at least 6 SATA ports.

You may like having other features like Anti-surge LAN, UEFI, M.2 & RGB support. Anti-surge LAN protects your motherboard in case of power surges. If you want to show off your CPU cabinet and Computer parts, then you would want a motherboard supports RGB and have RGB headers. The number of different ports on the Back Panel can also be a deciding factor. You can also get a motherboard with Wireless LAN & Bluetooth.

When Computer first boots up you see UEFI or BIOS, depending on what Firmware your motherboard has. Firmware is part hardware part software. It is a "Software" that is "Hard-coded" on an electronic chip which lists steps to follow when power is switched on.

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is replacing the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS).  UEFI provides a Graphical user interface where you can use Mouse while BOIS is a Text-based user interface where you must work with just Keyboard. More about this in later posts.

SATA ports bottleneck is that it can attain max read/write speed to 500MB/s. Newer Storage standards have introduced M.2 ports on which NVMe SSD drives can be connected can reach up to transfer speeds of 4GB/s. Thus, NVMe SSD can be much faster than standard 2.5” SSD drives. Besides being much faster than 2.5” SSD, NVMe M.2 SSD are smaller in size too. There are two types of NVMe M.2 connectors namely Type B or Type M.

In conclusion, a good motherboard would have 4 Memory slots, one PCIe3.0 x 16 slot, 6 SATA III ports, at least one M.2 port, one HDMI 2.0 at Back Panel, few USB 3.0 & a USB 3.1 port. To spice things up I suggest having one RGB header. Hope this post helps you.