The Mobo's here!

Got the motherboard two days ago.  That's "mobo" in geek-speak. I guess now that we're building our own computer, we need to learn more of this geek-speak stuff.

The mobo we bought was a Gigabyte brand: Z68XP-UD3.  We liked it because it has 10 USB ports and two firewire ports which we want to use for video editing.  And a very colourful box!  We haven't unpacked it yet, because mobos could be damaged with too much clumsy handling - we'll probably wait until we're ready to install the processor and memory.

The mobo box

Why this particular mobo? Even this one brand has dozens of different mobos.  This was one of the cheapest that came with firewire, and it also has a good range of expansion slots that we may want to use later on.  The most important thing seems to be to make sure the mobo has the right socket on it for the processor you want - we are planning to use an Intel Core i3, and the socket the mobo needs for that is called an 1155.  We're getting the hang of this geek speak ....