Motherboard vs. Circuit Board

What’s the difference between a motherboard and a circuit board?

The terms ‘motherboard’ and ‘circuit board’ are easy to confuse with each other but are actually very easy to learn.

A motherboard is a type of circuit board that serves as the central hub of a computer.

A motherboard is a type of circuit board, but a circuit board may or may not be a motherboard.

Let’s start by looking at circuit boards.

What is a Circuit Board?

A circuit board, more properly called a printed circuit board or PCB, is a solid, flat sheet of sandwiched conductors and insulators.

Circuit boards are really just a convenient and efficient way of making electric circuits. They give us a place to put all the different components and connections that make up an electric circuit.

Circuit boards are made out of sandwiched layers of insulators and conductors. Components are mounted to the board via soldering, which produces a solid electrical and mechanical connection for each point. The board itself is just the flat sheet without any components.

Any circuit board does two things: (1) It provides places for the circuit components to be mounted , i.e. soldered to the board. (2) It provides connections between the components so that we don’t have wires everywhere.

A circuit board helps facilitate the construction of complex circuits. The layout of the components and the complex connections (called traces) between them can be optimized. Soldering a component helps make its’ connections much more reliable. Not having wires means that the circuit is much easier to handle, takes up less space, and is much cheaper.

The circuit board also creates a centralized location on which the circuit lives. Different circuit boards can hold circuits that do different things, and many circuit boards can be connected together to make more complex systems.

There are circuit boards in many devices today: TVs, cars, refrigerators, and even toys.

One of the most common and important types of circuit board is the motherboard.

What is a Motherboard?

The motherboard is the centralized hub of a computer. It is a type of circuit board that has this specific function.

A modern computer is made of lots of different components. There are components that are essential, like the processor/CPU, memory, storage, and power supply. And there are also peripheral and auxiliary components that facilitate or extend functionality, like a keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, or external storage device.

The motherboard is a circuit board that serves as the connection point for all of the different components in the computer.

What makes the motherboard so special is that it takes all of these different components, connects them and allows them to communicate with each other. All of the information, the binary 0’s and 1’s in a computer, flows through the motherboard.

For example, the central processing unit (CPU) is often soldered or jacked directly into the motherboard. The CPU is an example of an integrated circuit; in fact it is the most important circuit of the whole computer.

Computer memory devices (like RAM, SRAM or DRAM sticks) also get plugged into the motherboard. A memory stick, or module, is itself a circuit board that contains memory modules, which are the integrated circuits on the stick.

The motherboard also connects to all of the peripheral devices and accessories, like the monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, and any external storage devices.

All of the data from all of these different components flows through the motherboard and the CPU. If the motherboard is a cell then the CPU is the nucleus. The CPU processes the data, using the different components like the memory and storage – all connected to the motherboard – to do its’ job.

Motherboard vs. Circuit Board – Final Thoughts

We have seen that a circuit board is a physical, board shaped device onto which an electrical circuit is mounted. Circuit boards can be made for many types of circuits, which include digital computers.

A motherboard is a type of circuit board that serves as the central connection hub for a modern computer.