i need to learn all about mother boards

[BD smileys]

hello, im hoping someone here can help me. well im still stuck with an old computer, its got a FIC SD11 mother board ( its a piece of crap, give random lag spkes, and its slower then my even older one -.- ) well im looking for an upgrade, and i want to make the right choice, but first i want to know everything about Mother boards befor i even think about buying one. i know some basic thing. i know about PCI and AGP. im just learning about the new slots like PCI-X and stuff like that. if someone would please give there time to teach me about the new up to date mother boards it would be helpful, even if it was just a small thing.

the spec on my computer now are :

SD11 mother board
voodoo 3 2000 video card
sound blaster 16
slot a AMD ATHON 500MHz
392MB SDRAM
20GB of harddrive space.

i want to get into computer programming someday, and i cant even start till i atleast know about a computer, at this point, any bits and piece of information about any mother board would be helpful.

 

[Matt]

Ello,

Well there are mobos (short for motherboards) designed for amd and intel prosessors.

At the moment AMD is running with socket AM2 processors and now with the advent of quad they are using Socket L1. Intel is working off an lga775 socket. the thing is to remember to check that mobos actually do support whatever processor by checkinhg the manufacturers page. This is especially relevant with only some intel boards supporting Core 2 Duo

You say you understand the AGP and PCI-E scene so no need to explain that

Then you get the two different types of ram. you get DDR wich only supports up to 400mhz and now you get DDR2 wich goes much higher. the thing is to check the maufacturers page for support because some mobos only support up to DDR2 533mhz or 667mhz. these ram chips are very different and they dont fit into the same slots.

Then you get SATA (new kind of connection type now being used in most new harddrives and optical drives). All new boards have it though

 

[donkey42]

PCI-E

PSIe

DDR2 is 240 pin & DDR is 184 pin although there are some mobo's that support both DDR & DDR2 also some mobo's actually have a PCIe & an AGP slot like this but that particular mobo will not work with a 3.3 volt AGP card, AGP comes in 3 flavours (i think)

generally the newer processors use DDR2 and a PSU that is ATX 2.2 not ATX 2.0 (the only difference is: an ATX 2.0 PSU has a 24 pin connection to the mobo wheras the ATX 2.2 has 2 connections a 20 pin connection and a 4 pin connection, apparetly some PSU manufacturers did make the 4 pin mobo connection detachable from the 20 pin connection but i don't know if they still do or not

Edit: SATA = Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
SATA is available as 150mb/s (megabits per second) & 300mb/s (i my memory is correct)