The life and times of the modern motherboard

Posted at: Tuesday 27th November 2007 by Alex Watson

Ever wondered how a motherboard and its BIOS are designed and made? What makes one a brilliant overclocker and another as stable as a plate of jelly on a bouncy castle? Alex Watson investigates.

As Gigabyte's Chang explains, 'The motherboard hardware goes through several developing stages of circuit design, sample production, testing and modification; the BIOS goes through the same stages of development to ensure that the motherboard works properly.'

Not only do different aspects of motherboard design sustain and alter each other, they also need to be accomplished quickly. Although production timescales differ between various motherboard manufacturers, in general, those we spoke to for this feature agreed that a fairly standard motherboard would probably take two months to develop. Even a complex, high-end board will only take between four and five months.

One way to produce a motherboard quickly, especially when a new chipset has just been launched, is to stick with the reference design. Intel, Nvidia and AMD will generally supply the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers with a 'customer reference board' (CRB) sample when they're introducing a new chipset. 'CRBs are almost like an assembly guide, and if you follow them, things will most likely work,' explains Yu. 'Some motherboard makers choose only to make or buy these CRBs, and sell them as they are. We follow the guidelines to ensure that the chipsets run as they should, but the fun starts when we develop something that's different from the original reference design. The chipset vendors offer suggestions and recommendations, but we make the final call on design.'

Prototypes

Several iterations of a board design will be drafted before it's sent to mass manufacturing, but not every version will actually be physically made. 'Asus has a company motto: "Do it right, first time",' says Yu. 'Our culture is, before you do anything, you have to think it through. We carry out a lot of study when we're designing the board to try to keep the revisions to a minimum.

'Of course, you have to test it, and testing can help you to improve on some aspects of the board. For most motherboards, there will be two revisions, although there might be more for premium and ROG boards.'

While Asus is strict when it comes to making test samples of retail motherboards, this is partly because new ideas are often not developed with specific products in mind. 'We have two types of prototype, so in addition to the standard design revisions, we also have a lot of prototypes that we develop side-by-side [with retail products] for specific innovation purposes,' says Yu.

These prototypes don't always pan out. One area in which Asus has been interested for several years is removing heat from the underside of the board, particularly beneath the CPU socket. The current design that deals with this is called 'Stack Cool', but it's basically just a thickened PCB, and Asus is working on improving this. One idea was to cut two holes in the PCB, in order to let heat from underneath the board reach the better-cooled top, but this didn't work as planned.