Motherboard explained – chipsets, sockets and ports!
Are you struggling to understand all the jargon surrounding motherboards – AM4 this, PCIe that, X570 or B450 – so much to know and for many it’s not all too clear, so in this video I want to walk you through the main parts you need to know to get you started understanding motherboards – with as little preexisting knowledge as possible.
So lets start with the main bit, the relation between the socket – the bit your CPU goes into, and the chipset – which is normally about half the name of the motherboard – ie MSI B450 Tomahawk Max. So, like i said the socket is the bit your CPU goes in, you’ll need to find a board that fits your CPU – so if you are looking to buy AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, you’ll want an “AM4” socket motherboard, whereas if you want, say an Intel i9 9900K, you’ll want an LGA 1151 socket board.
The chipset on the other hand is the bit that lets the CPU talk to almost everything else on the board, like your hard drives and USB ports normally. They are often generational, based on the generation of CPU you want to buy – and you’ll have to be careful here because some CPUs actually use the same socket but require wholly different chipsets, so make sure you check the compatibility list on the motherboard’s website to see if your CPU will fit.
Now, lets talk through a few of the sockets you might find on modern boards – the first is AM4. Like I mentioned, this is for AMD’s Ryzen and Althon CPUs, and is what’s called a PGA or Pin Grid Array socket, because the back of the CPU is covered in a load of pins, 1331 of them in fact, which slot into the holes in the socket. AMD has older versions of this socket, called AM3 and FM2 for their older CPUs, but these are not the same socket so they aren’t cross-compatible.
Intel have their own style, it’s called LGA or Land Grid Array, because on the back of the CPU it’s, well, flat. All the pins are inside the socket instead, and depending on the CPU, you’ll get differing numbers of pins in there. For their desktop CPUs like the 9900KS or 9600K, it’s 1151 pins, so LGA 1151, but their high end desktop chips use either LGA 2011 for older ones, or LGA 2066 for slightly newer ones. They do also have a massive one called LGA3647 for their Xeon chips, but it’s unlikely you’ll be building with that if you are watching this video!
AMD do also use the LGA style socket for their high end desktop and server chips, they call them sTRX4 and the older version, TR4, which is a massive socket too, for the equally massive CPUs.
So, that’s the sockets, what about those chipsets? Well, each socket regularly has multiple chipsets that support that socket, so for AMD’s AM4 socket, there is technically a total of 7 chipsets that can use AM4 right now, although AMD only has 2 ‘current generation’ chipsets properly supported, that’s X570, the higher end option, and B450 which is more budget oriented. There are feature differences between them, namely PCIe Gen 4 support – we will cover what that means in a minute – but suffice to say generally you can buy B450 and be fine 99% of the time.
On the Intel side, it’s more complicated. So for the most part if you are buying a mainstream desktop CPU, like a 9900K, you’d want a Z390 motherboard. The Z is their higher end board that lets you overclock your unlocked CPU, whereas their H and B series boards generally don’t. If you are buying a high end chip like a 10980XE, you’ll want an X299 chipset board, and if you are buying Xeon, you’ll want to find the right C series chipset for your chip – Intel’s Ark website will be your friend there.
What about all the ports and connectors? Well, starting with one of the important one, RAM. All the boards and chipsets I’ve mentioned all use DDR4 – the 4th generation double data rate RAM – but in varying configurations. Generally, on mainstream boards from both Intel and AMD, you can use up to 4 sticks of DDR4 – but on HEDT boards like Threadripper or X299 it can up to 8 sticks.
What about that PCIe I mentioned? Well, it’s a type of connection that’s called a shared bus. It’s split into a set amount of lanes – either 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 – it’s normally seen in the long slots below the CPU socket, the ones you’d find graphics cards as they use the PCIe bus. The longer the slot the more lanes it has, but there is a slight trick as the longest slots, x16, often aren’t actually wired up fully which you can often see as there are no pins towards the back of the slot.
And one extra layer of complexity is that there are different generations of PCIe bus, most boards are currently Gen 3, but AMD’s X570 boards – paired with 3rd Generation Ryzen CPUs – are able to use gen 4 – which runs at double the speed of gen 3 and is particularly handy when you have a supported M.2 SSD – as those also use the PCIe bus, and go into the M.2 slots you’ll find on most motherboards now.
While we are talking about storage, there is also the now older SATA connectors which are what most hard disc drives and older SATA SSDs use to connect – it’s not as fast but it often means those drives are cheaper so it’s a fair tradeoff.
And I think lastly for this video, there are normally 2 or 3 power connectors on a motherboard that you’ll need to connect. The main one is the large 24 pin connector on the top/mid right and powers most of the board, and then there is some combination of 4 or 8 pin connector(s) up at the top left that specifically power the CPU.
