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Motherboards
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The Mother of All Motherboards This is the front and back of the prototype of the first IBM PC motherboard in 1981. The chips are wired together on a "breadboard" designed for making new system boards. (Images courtesy of International Business Machines Corporation. Unauthorized use not permitted.)
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Motherboards use electrolytic capacitors to filter the DC power distributed around the board. These capacitors age at a temperature-dependent rate, as their water based electrolytes slowly evaporate. This can lead to loss of capacitance and subsequent motherboard malfunctions due to voltage instabilities. While most capacitors are rated for 2000 hours of operation at 105 °C,[9] their expected design life roughly doubles for every 10 °C below this. At 45 °C a lifetime of 15 years can be expected. This appears reasonable for a computer motherboard... many manufacturers have delivered substandard capacitors, which significantly reduce this life expectancy.
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Motherboards have come a long way in the last twenty years. The first motherboards held very few actual components. The first IBM PC motherboard had only a processor and card slots. Users plugged components like floppy drive controllers and memory into the slots.
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The basic changes in motherboard form factors over the years are covered later in this section - the diagrams below provide a detailed look at the various components on two motherboards. The first is a Baby AT design, sporting the Socket 7 processor connector, circa 1995. The second is an ATX design, with a Pentium II Slot 1 type processor connector, typical of motherboards on the market in late 1998.
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Motherboards are produced in a variety of sizes and shapes ("form factors"), some of which are specific to individual computer manufacturers. However, the motherboards used in IBM-compatible commodity computers have been standardized to fit various case sizes. As of 2007, most desktop computer motherboards use one of these standard form factors—even those found in Macintosh and Sun computers which have not traditionally been built from commodity components.
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"Silicon Image's SiI 4723 provides a very high quality hardware RAID solution that complements the other leading edge features of ASUSTeK's Digital Home desktop motherboards," said Jerry Shen, General Manager of ASUSTeK Open Optimum Platform Business Group. "Our customers are assured that their personal digital content is safe, and ASUSTeK benefits from fewer support calls due to the simplicity and elegance of Silicon Image's SteelVine storage architecture."
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