A motherboard is the main circuit board inside a computer that connects different parts of a computer together. It has sockets for the CPU, RAM and expansion cards and it also hooks up to hard drives, disc drives and front panel ports with cables and wires. There has been continuous innovative development in the area of motherboards with the bus speed increasing to a few giga bytes per sec and increasing connector density. Most widely used motherboards such as ATX, ITX are discussed.

The tutorial provides a detailed view of important components of a typical computer motherboard, which include SATA/EIDE disk drives, USB 2.0/3.0 connectors, eSATA connectors, and PCIe connectors. CPU socket types, north bridge and memory slots have been discussed.