There are many types of motherboards that depend on form factors like their dimension and size, and layout of the
components on it. It is important to know all about their form factors before buying one, as you can't just install
any motherboard in your computer system.
Full AT: It is 12 inches wide and 11 inches long. Earlier, it had a complication due to it's inability to access some
items on the motherboard as the drive bays hung over the motherboard. Due to this, it was very difficult in installing
and troubleshooting the components on the motherboard. Another problem was, when the expansion cards were inserted into
the systems, the whole processor was covered, which led to cooling problems because of insufficient ventilation to the
chip.
Baby AT: This type was been widely used in recent years. It is 8.5 inches wide and 19 inches long. It can easily be
distinguished as it has a DIN keyboard connector at the top-right corner. It was about 2/3rd of the size of an Full
AT board. It consisted of a combination of SA/EISA and PCI slots and also had a plug and play BIOS.
ATX: This type of motherboard was built in order to support the Pentium II processor and the new AGP slot for video cards.
It is 7.5 inches wide and 12 inches long. It consists of all IO ports that are directly connected to the board, which also
included USB ports. A new 100 MHz system bus was introduced in ATX motherboards that overtook old Pentium boards which ran
on 60/66 MHz. It also included a soft power support that enabled the operating system to shutdown the system. Cards
inserted into the bus systems do not cover the whole processor and so provide proper cooling to the motherboard.
Before purchasing a motherboard for your system, read reviews on the Internet, consider what all components it supports
and finally buy it from a reputed retailer.
Some parts of it
1:PCI Slot: PCI or Peripheral Component Interconnect slots
2:AGP Slot: Standing for "Accelerated Graphics Port
3:Connectors for Integrated Peripherals
4:CPU Socket:This is the housing for your very sensitive, very expensive processor chip.
5:CPU Fan & Heatsink Mounts
6:Memory Slot
7:Power Connector
