The Chipset or Motherboard is the physical circuit board that all components connect to and as such one of its primary roles is to co-ordinate the flow of data between them. The heartbeat that sets the speed of this traffic is called the Front Side Bus and is measured in MHz It’s vitally important that none of the components are kept waiting for their information otherwise you get what is called a bottleneck and performance becomes hampered by the lowest common denominator. The greater the range and number of connectors the better the expandability and choice, PCI slots offer expansion for the more specialised components like Sound, Television, Video editing and network cards, USB sockets offer a more traditional plug-in and go type experience and many peripheral accessories like printers, scanners, webcams and controllers can be connected or unplugged on the fly.

Additional features you may want to look out for include the ability to connect to the Internet via a built in Fast Ethernet port which will ensure trouble free installation and will save you the cost of buying a network card, a good choice of audio connectors if choosing to use a motherboard’s built-in sound and a reliable BIOS to keep the low-level (background) systems running smoothly.