Buying a motherboard can be a tricky process, and it is important to pick the right motherboard for you system, as it is the backbone through which your processor (the brain) communicates with the rest of the system.
The main thing to consider is that your motherboard is compatible with all the components in your machine. The most important component is, of course, your CPU, and a lot of CPU's come in many different factors, with pin count and size being the two most often differentiating features as far as compatibility with the motherboard, but speeds can also be a consideration.
The chipset on the motherboard is a very important consideration, too. As this is built into the board and not upgradeable or changeable like other components, choosing a motherboard with an aging chipset will ultimately limit your system's potential capabilities. Many motherboards use the same standard chipset, so there may be times when you'll have to look at the little things (such as the number of PCI slots) to ultimately decide which motherboard will best fit your needs.
Next in line of important aspects to consider is the graphics hardware. Generally speaking, motherboards will come with onboard graphics that serve the most basic necessities, but anything beyond that requires a dedicated graphics card. If you need a card, you have to look at whether or not your system has an AGP or a PCI Express connection. As PCI-E has mostly replaced AGP as the standard in this field, this is becoming less of a factor as time goes by.
Other connected devices to consider, such as hard drives or RAM, are mostly a non issue as the standard connections for those devices have been around for a while. Just make sure you know whether or not your motherboard supports DDR2 or DDR3 memory so you don't waste money buying the wrong type of RAM, as those are currently the most prolific standards of memory on the market today.
Storage is also an import factor to keep in mind. Most hard drives today connect through SATA, and every relatively new motherboard has SATA. Disk drives can also connect through SATA, though the older PATA standard is still generally used for this. There's also USB and Firewire ports to think about in regards to external storage, but practically every motherboard has USB today.
Other connections, such as sound or networking, are usually already taken care of on the motherboard. If you need a dedicated card for these needs, though, most connect to the standard PCI port.
The last thing to consider is form factor: ATX is the general form you'll find in the vast majority of desktop machines, with microATX filling the need if your computer case is tiny. There are other special form factors out there if you have very specific needs.
So long as you keep all of these little bits of information straight and double check everything to make sure it will all work together, you shouldn't have any trouble building and running your new computer.
Source : http://www.goarticles.com by Matthew Kerridge
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