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The motherboard is the main board inside the computer. It is the biggest one and the one that everything else is connected to. The motherboard has one main function. It accepts data and transfers it to where it needs to be. It also accepts all of the cards that are needed for the computer to run. Some of these are the Expansion Cards such as the modem or sound card, the EIDE cables out to the Hard Drive or CD-ROM, the Floppy Drive Cable, the CPU, and the RAM.
The motherboard transfers all data through a sort of pathway called the BUS. The bus determines the speed of the motherboard. If the motherboard is 100mhz that means that that's how fast the motherboard can transport data from one place to another via the bus.
The CPU may be the single most important component of the computer. It does all of the calculations and determines what goes where. You can think of it as the "brain" of the computer. The CPU is a medium sized chip shaped like a square. It gets so hot that without a heatsink or fan it would melt itself. Depending on the speed of the CPU you may need a bigger heatsink and fan. CPU speeds have been steadily increasing. They double every two years. That means that if you have a 1.5 Ghz CPU that in 2 years they will have a 3 Ghz CPU out, and two years after that a 6 Ghz and so on. CPU speeds today are approaching 2 Ghz, but not that long ago you would have been called crazy to say that there would be a Gigahertz processor out one day for the home user. CPU technology has increased greatly in the past few years.
The power supply converts the power from the socket in your wall from Watts to Volts. There are four standard voltages that the computer uses, -5, -12, 12, and 5. The power supply converts it into these voltages.
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