▷ Types of motherboards: at, atx, lpx, btx, micro atx and mini itx

The motherboard is the heart of a PC, it is the main printed circuit board present in computers, which contains the main electronic components of the system, such as the central processing unit and memory, and also provides the connectors for other important peripherals.. This article we will see the different types of motherboards, as well as their most important characteristics.

The main types of motherboards that exist or have ever existed

Without further ado, let's look at the different types of motherboards that have populated the PC market.

We recommend reading our article on Best motherboards on the market

AT motherboard

An AT motherboard has dimensions of the order of a few hundred millimeters, large enough so that it cannot fit in mini desks, these dimensions make it difficult to install the new units. The concept of six-pin connectors was born to function as the power connectors for these types of motherboards. Produced in the mid-1980s, this motherboard lasted a long time from the Pentium p5 until the days when the Pentium 2 was first used.

ATX motherboard

Popularly known as ATX, they are the basecoats produced by Intel in the mid-1990s as an enhancement to previously working motherboards, such as AT. These types of motherboards differ from their AT counterparts in the way that these boards allow the exchange of connected parts. In addition, the dimensions of this motherboard are smaller than those of the AT motherboard and therefore suitable place for drive bays is also allowed. Some changes were also made to the connector system of the motherboard. AT motherboards had a keyboard connector and additional slots for various plugins were provided on the backboards. Its size is 305 mm × 244 mm.

LPX motherboard

Low profile extension motherboards, better known as LPX motherboards, were created after ATs in the 1990s. The main difference between these boards and the older ones is that the input and output ports of these are present in the back of the system. This concept proved to be beneficial and was also adopted by AT models in their newer versions. The use of a riser card was also made for the placement of a few more slots. But these expansion cards also posed the problem that the air flow was not adequate. Also, some low-quality LPX boards didn't even have a real AGP slot and just connected to the PCI bus. All of these unfavorable aspects led to the extinction of this motherboard system and it was succeeded by the NLX.

BTX motherboard

BTX was developed to reduce or avoid some of the problems that arose when using the latest technologies. New technologies often demand more power and also release more heat when implemented on motherboards in accordance with the ATX specification from around 1996. The ATX standard and the BTX standard were both proposed by Intel. Further development of BTX retail products was canceled in September 2006 by Intel after accepting Intel's decision to re-focus on low-power CPUs after suffering from issues like scaling and thermal with the Pentium 4.

The BTX design provides a straighter airflow path with less difficulty, resulting in better overall cooling capabilities. Instead of a dedicated cooling fan, a large 12cm box fan is mounted, which draws its air directly from the outside of the PC, and then cools the CPU through an air duct. Another BTX feature is the vertical mounting of the motherboard on the left side. This type of feature makes the graphics card heat sink or fan face up, rather than in the direction of the adjacent expansion card.

Pico BTX motherboard

Pico BTX is a motherboard form factor intended to manufacture BTX standards of even smaller size. This is smaller than many current "micro" size motherboards, hence the name "Pico" has been used. These motherboards share a common top half with the other sizes in the BTX line, but only support one or two expansion slots, designed for mid-height card or riser card applications.

In the initial stages of use, ATX and BTX motherboards were so analogous that it was possible to move a BTX motherboard to an ATX box and vice versa. In later stages, the BTX form factor had a major modification that was made by converting it to a mirror image of the ATX standard. BTX power supply units can be swapped with the latest ATX12V units, but not with older ATX power supplies that do not have the additional 4-pin 12V connector.

Micro ATX motherboards

MicroATX is a type of small and standard PC motherboard form factor. The maximum size of a MicroATX board is 244 mm × 244 mm, while the ATX standard is 25% larger with dimensions of 305 mm × 244 mm. The currently available MicroATX motherboards are compatible with Intel or AMD processors, but at the moment there are none for any architecture other than x86 or x86-64.

Mini ITX motherboards

Mini-ITX is a 17 × 17 cm low power motherboard form factor. It was designed by VIA Technologies in 2001. They are primarily used in small form factor (SFF) computer systems. Mini-ITX boards can also be easily cooled due to their low power consumption architecture. Such architecture makes them widely useful for home theater PC systems or systems where noise can diminish the quality or value of the movie experience. The four mounting holes on a Mini-ITX board line up with the four holes on the ATX specification motherboards, and the locations of the backplane and expansion slot are the same. Therefore, Mini-ITX boards can be used in locations that are designed for ATX, micro-ATX, and other ATX variants, if required. The Mini-ITX form factor has location for an expansion slot, belonging to a standard 33MHz 5V 32bit PCI slot. Some non-x86 processor-based boards have a 3.3V PCI slot, and Mini-ITX 2.0 (2008) boards have a PCI-express × 16 slot.

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This ends our article on the different motherboard formats and their characteristics, you can leave a comment if you have any questions.