When purchasing or building a computer, you have a many options for motherboard type and form factor. In this video, you’ll learn about the ATX motherboard standard, the micro-ATX standard, and the ITX motherboard form factors.
If you were to look around at the different computing platforms that we use, we have our larger desktop computers. But you might also have a much smaller computer, perhaps one that you would use in a small office or one that you would use next to your television. Both of these have the same type of components inside. There’s CPU, memory, storage, network connections, and other components that are very similar between these two platforms.
But obviously, these platforms are very different in their total footprint. The desktop computer is much larger, and the computer next to our media center or that we use at work is a much smaller system. Obviously, the motherboard in this much smaller system is not going to be the same form factor. So it is useful to make some differentiations between one type of motherboard and another.
Physical size is certainly something to consider when you’re looking at different motherboards. We also have to look at the overall layout of the components that are on the motherboard itself. Larger motherboards tend to have more flexibility and can have a larger number of components than a smaller motherboard.
We also have to think about power. Fortunately, most motherboards have a standard power connection, but not all motherboards have exactly the same power connection. We have to think about airflow. All of these systems do get warm, and we need to make sure that whatever cooling system we use is able to keep up with the heat that’s being generated by this motherboard.
Fortunately, we don’t have to memorize or know about every possible motherboard that was ever created. If we look at Wikipedia, there are over 40 different motherboard types. Fortunately for your A+ certification, you only need to focus on understanding three of those 40.
If you were to look at the objectives, they state, Section 3.5 says, “Given a scenario, install and configure motherboards, central processing units– CPUs– and add-on cards.” This is one where we need to focus on what the exam objectives themselves are expecting us to know. We need to know which motherboard we would choose for any particular scenario. So if you’re putting a motherboard in a media center, you might need one type of motherboard, which is very different than a motherboard you might use on a desktop computer to perform video editing.
For the purposes of the A+ exam, we need to understand the nuances between the ATX motherboard, the Micro-ATX motherboard, and the ITX motherboard. Here’s a one-page summary of all three of those motherboard types.
The standard ATX is one that is the largest on this particular screen, and we’ll talk more about why that tends to be a much larger motherboard type. In the middle is the Micro-ATX, which is very similar in its layout to the standard ATX, albeit a bit smaller. And then on the smaller side is the Mini-ITX, which is the smallest of these three.
The ATX form factor stands for Advanced Technology Extended, and it’s a standard that’s been around for a very long time, since 1995. There have been a number of changes to the ATX standard over the years, but the current version of ATX is very similar to the one that was released back then.
The main power on the ATX motherboard has changed a bit over time. Early versions of the ATX standard had a 20-pin connector for the main system board power. More modern versions have a 24-pin connector.
This is an ATX motherboard from gigabyte. It’s the GA-P67A-UD3P-B3. You can see that this motherboard is rather large. It has a number of expansion slots on it. This one has four separate memory slots for adding additional memory. And you can see the CPU in the middle of the motherboard. Make a note of these relative sizes between the CPU, the memory slots, and the expansion card slots, because we’ll want to compare them when looking at other motherboard types.
The Micro-ATX is very similar in layout to the ATX motherboard, but it is slightly smaller than that ATX standard. This also has a lot of similarities to ATX. For example, the mounting points on this motherboard are at exactly the same points as the mounting points on a full-size ATX motherboard. This also has the same power connectors as the full-size ATX motherboard. And this is another popular form factor, primarily because it does follow the same standards as ATX, but it does fit into a much smaller form factor.
This Micro-ATX motherboard is the MSI H81M-P33. You can see that this has a similar layout to the full-size ATX, but this does have a limited number of resources. For example, this Micro-ATX motherboard only has a single expansion slot, and it only has two memory slots available. Obviously, the ATX motherboard is much larger, and we’re able to fit more components onto the larger motherboard. When we shrink these down into the Micro-ATX size, we have to make decisions about what components we’re going to keep on this motherboard and what components are not going to make the cut.
And if you’re looking for a very small-sized motherboard, you might want to consider an ITX motherboard. This ITX motherboard you see on the screen is a Mini-ITX, which is one of the smallest versions of the ITX format.
You can see that the Mini-ITX motherboard is a relatively small board, but they did keep the same mounting screw points as a traditional ATX motherboard. That means we could take the case that was designed for an ATX motherboard and install a Mini-ITX motherboard inside of that case.
This very small form factor makes a perfect size if you need to fit it into a very tight area. So if you need a streaming media device that’s next to your television or you just need a single computer that handles one single task, this might be the right motherboard for you.