Motherboards
How they work
Chipsets
In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in an integrated circuit that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the motherboard. Some examples of Intel chipsets are the Z97 and the X99 They are compatible only with certain cpu's for example the X99 chipsets run the 5th gen Intel CPU's or codenamed Broadwell whereas the Z97 chipset runs 4th gen CPU's like the Intel i5 4770k. AMD has there own range of CPU's and chipsets.
PCI Slots
The PCI slot can be used to transfer data and sometimes power to a component for example the new graphics cards use PCie (Gen1, Gen2, Gen3) to transfer the data and the older ones only use PCI. Networking cards used to recieve signals from the router which connects the pc to the internet. Netwroking cards are used if your room or pc does not have a ethernet port. Most graphics cards use 16 PCI lanes but when you run two of them in SLI your cpu may only be able to run 16 PCI lanes so the graphics card only uses 8 of the lanes slowing down your cards.
Sata and IDE motherboards
The Sata and IDE ports are used to transfer data from the hardrive to the rest of the PC via the Sata and IDE cables. The newer Sata ports can transfer at higher speeds whereas the old IDE is much slower with the cable being bigger and less efficient.
Inbuilt motherboard IO
Most modern motherboards have a range of IO ports built into the PC for example USB, Headphone and Microphone jack, ethernet, Video ports. Only the more modern PC's have video ports because the CPU's have graphics cores built in running from 550MHZ to 750MHZ depending whether you overclock the card.
Bios
The PC's bios can be used to monitor the PC's temperature and FanRPM. It can also be used to overclock your PC upping the CPU clock speed making the PC faster but more volatile to burning up and short circuiting.
PCI Lanes
The pci lanes are used to put expansion cards in to upgrade your pc's perfomance storage or networking. For exaple nvidia has the own range of gpu's which plug inti the board via normally the new pcie version 1, 2, 3 but you can plug networking cards into only pci slots. Most pcilanes have a number of lanes for example pcie x8 or x16. This means there are either 16 lanes in the slot or 8 lanes in use.