A PC motherboard is a printed circuit board used in laptops and personal computers. It is also known as the mainboard or planar board and occasionally abbreviated to mobo or MB. The term mainboard is also used for the main circuit board in this and other electronic devices.

A typical motherboard psound card, hard disk controller, rovides attachment points for one or more of the following: CPU, graphics card, memory (RAM), and external peripheral devices. The connectors for external peripherals are nearly always color coded according to the PC 99 specification.

All of the basic circuitry and components required for a computer to function are onboard the motherboard or are connected with a cable. The most important component on a motherboard is the chipset. It often consists of two components or chips known as the Northbridge and Southbridge, though they may als