ATX Motherboard

A motherboard is a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that connects your processor, memory and all your expansion cards together to assemble a PC. Most motherboards made nowadays are ATX. An ATX motherboard has the standard I/O (Input/Output) connectors such as PS/2 ports, USB ports, parallel port, serial port, etc, built onto the motherboard. ATX motherboard fits into a standard ATX case. The following is a picture of a Modern ATX motherboard.

As you can see from the image, the motherboard comes with various expansion card slots and connectors. It comes with 4 different expansion slots, 2 PCI and 2 PCI Express slot.

The PCI slot is where you would connect cards such as sound card, modem, tv card etc.

The PCI Express slot is where you would connect a PCI-E graphics card. This particular motherboard allows to have two different graphics cards in a SLI or Crossfire configuration.

The other connectors includes Intel LGA 1366 Socket, DDR3 Memory slots, ATX 2.0 24pin power connector. SATA connector for connecting your Hard drive, DVD-ROM etc.

Recommended Motherboards:

Intel Socket 1155:

ASUS P8H67-M LE LGA 1155 SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 Supported Intel H67 DDR3 1333 Micro ATX Motherboard 

Gigabyte Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 LGA 1155 Motherboard GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 

ASUS SABERTOOTH P67 LGA 1155 SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 Supported Intel P67 DDR3 1800 ATX Motherboard 

AMD Socket AM3+ :

ASUS Socket AM3+ - Hybrid Crossfire Integrated Graphics Support AMD 760G DDR3 1600 Micro ATX Motherboards M5A78L-M LX 

GIGABYTE GA-970A-UD3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard 

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX - AM3+ - TUF Series - ATX AMD 990FX DDR3 1800 Motherboards