MSI PRO A520M-S

The physical size of the motherboard. TopPC.ee offers ATX (full size board), mATX (micro ATX) (a board of reduced size) and miniATX size motherboards. Within the housing of an ATX size computer it is possible to place both ATX and mATX motherboard, however, in the mATX housing it is not possible to place an ATX board.

The ATX board has at least 3 memory slots and at least 5 local slots PCI, which means that a well functioning powerful computer can be built on this board. However, a home or office computer does not need this high number of slots, therefore also microATX will be suitable.

The connector of the power supply unit of the motherboard is the power source socket which are currently of ATX and ATX2.0 standard. ATX is an older standard with a 20pin connector (20 "pins"), and ATX2.0 has 4 additional pins (20+4). The motherboards of ATX standard can operate with a ATX2.0 power supply unit (PSU), however the mother board of ATX2.0 standard requires an ATX2.0 power supply unit.

Form-factor is rather a recommendation. However, prior to buying a mother board you should verify the compatibility of the housing size to the motherboard size and its power supply connector.

The chip bus is the most important criterion of selecting the motherboard (the system logic chips or the voltage transformers). The chip bus determines the CPUs, memory ports and other parameters that are supported by the motherboard.

Each chipset is directly related to a certain CPU platform which are divided based upon the family of CPUs or the connection point of the CPU.

The RAM bus determines what type of RAM is supported by the relevant motherboard.

The bus marking contains the memory type DDRII or DDRIII as well as the maximum memory clock frequency that is supported by the mother board. The type of memory is the most important index, memories of different types are physically different, therefore DDRIII memory cannot be connected to the mother board that supports DDRII memory (except the cases when the motherboard supports both types of memory). However the motherboard that support 800Mhz DDRII memory can work with the memory speeds of DDII667 and DDRII533. The mother board with the memory bus speed below the speed of the memory module will be able to operate as fast as the specified bus speed only, i.e. if the memory bus of the motherboard is DDRII667 and the memory DDRII800 is installed it will operate with the speed of DDRII667.

The parameter that determines whether a video card has been integrated with the motherboard. An integrated video card is suitable for working with the office software, Internet, watching films and playing simple games. If you wish to use graphics applications, play 3D games and watch 3D animations you would need an additional video card.

An integrated video card uses a fraction of the memory included in the mother board, therefore, if your motherboard has 1Gb memory and in the settings of the video card of the mother board it is stated that it takes 256mb the operating system will display the available memory volume of approximately 700 Mb.
Prior to buying a motherboard with a built-in video card you should verify whether it has an additional video card port for further upgrades if these are required