If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at, motherboards—particularly high-end models—can look more like the Transformers’ home world of Cybertron than something you might plug your drives, CPU, and graphics card into. And with dozens of models available for most platforms, unless you’re up on all the lingo and the latest tech, it can be tough to know where to start.
Below, we’ll diagram most of the major ports, headers, and slots that are common on today’s motherboards, followed…
