eli5 – how do motherboards work?
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Basically, a computer consists of a bunch of components that need to connect to each other. For example, a central processing unit (which does calculations and makes decisions, runs programs and so on), memory (used to store programs and temporary information), storage (disk drives), circuits to generate pictures for a screen, or connect keyboards/mouse.
A motherboard is just a bunch of connectors and wires so that you can take commonly used combinations of modules and connect them together. Sometimes, modules which you would always need, and would never need to choose, would be integrated into the motherboard.
With more modern computers, all the main circuitry is in the modules (like the CPU), so all the motherboard really has to do is provide power (there are quite a lot of power supply circuits on a modern PC motherboard) and provide thousands and thousands of wires which connect the CPU to the RAM, the graphics card, wifi and hard drives/SSD.
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