Buyers Guide: Part 2 – The Motherboard

Posted Sunday, April 25, 2004

 E-mail this page    Printer-friendly page

So if buying a computer or changing your motherboard then you will need to determine your needs.

An important question is what are you going to use the computer for? There is no point in buying an all singing and dancing system if all you want to do is surf the net, but do remember that 6 months after buying the system you may decide to use it for other things, and if it is not upgradeable, then you could be looking at an expensive change.

So to round up, make sure that when buying, even if all the components are onboard that you have free expansion slots so that the system is future proof. An AGP port (allows for graphics card changes) and free PCI slots (used for adding expansion cards), support for Pentium 4 or Athlon XP processors, and DDR memory are some of the important, and presently modern items that you would look for.