Next Generation Motherboard Platforms - Part 1: The Athlon Craze

Stability, stability, stability. This should be your primary concern when pursuing any motherboard, especially an Athlon motherboard. The current crop of boards that are available for sale are examples of what are not extremely stable motherboards. Problems with not being able to supply enough current to the AGP slot to drive TNT2 Ultra cards will disappoint just about anyone that spends close to $200 on a motherboard that can't even run their TNT2 Ultra at its rated speed.

Power supply compatibility issues will be a big factor with the first batch of Athlon motherboards, which is why the boards that are available now are basically engineering samples released to the public to find out what works and what doesn't. AMD has put together a list of recommended power supplies that you can find here. If you're going to be buying a new Athlon CPU + motherboard, be sure to get your power supply from the same vendor if possible, and make sure that the power supply is on AMD's approved list, otherwise you may be faced with some instability problems.

As the Athlon is thrust into the high end workstation/server market, expect to see much more compatibility testing performed with higher density SDRAM modules. With only three DIMM slots present on all currently announced/available Athlon motherboards, a 384MB memory limit isn't enough for some high end users.

For overclockers, you can expect to see the return of the race for the most overclockable motherboard. There are a few smaller motherboard manufacturers that will be coming out with "overclockable" Athlon motherboards that simply support more FSB settings but, the true trick will lie in the ability to control the clock multiplier of the Athlon CPU. This is definitely possible, and it is only a matter of time before we see a motherboard that either ships with support for such a modification or ships with the modification module itself.

Stability will be key to the success of Athlon motherboards, being able to deliver the proper amount of current to the processor and making sure that the signal's integrity remains strong are very important factors. This will be accomplished by using high quality components and a superior QA testing methodology, so what motherboards are there to look out for?

By the end of this year, you will have seen at least some information on a few very hot (supposedly) Athlon boards, including the elusive ASUS board as well as boards from Tyan and AOpen. The latter two should be very interesting, as we've only seen a handful of AOpen boards that were truly inferior in quality, and judging from what Tyan was saying about their upcoming Athlon motherboard, it should be a winner as well.

Both of those companies have consistently produced very solid motherboards, but also worth noting is that they both have traditionally produced inferior products (when compared to their usual standards) when dealing with non-Intel chipsets. AOpen has gotten much better about the quality of their VIA based motherboards as we've can see by their latest Apollo Pro 133 based offering, and we are beginning to see the same from Tyan. It seems like most motherboard manufacturers are coming to the conclusions that going Intel isn't always the best option.

Be sure to keep your eyes open for Part II of this series, focusing on the i820 and motherboards based on the chipset.