Motherboards

The motherboard is the central hub of a PC, the board to which every other main component connects – CPUs in the socket, memory in the DIMM slots, and GPUs, sound cards and other expansion cards in the PCI slots. Hard disks, SSDs, optical drives and front-panel ports also connect to it. Intel motherboards have numerous socket types, chipsets and form factors, so make sure you've got the right configuration before buying. Intel's latest product range includes the mainstream intel LGA1200 and high-end LGA2066 sockets used by the Z500 Series and X299 chipsets to the socket 1700 used by the 600 and 700 series while the AMD range have six main sockets: AM1, AM3+, FM2, FM2+, AM4 and TR4, depending on the processor used. The latest Ryzen chips use AM4 while the Threadripper performance monster requires a TR4-based motherboard.