Next Generation Motherboard Platforms - Part 1: The Athlon Craze

The AMD 750 chipset is already obsolete and , if we don't believe that, then we might as well spend hundreds of dollars on the Gigabyte, FIC, and MSI boards only to be told that we were nothing more than guinea pigs for the rest of the market.

The transition towards VIA's solution is imminent, the first signs of this will be the fact that more and more motherboard manufacturers will be looking towards the VIA 686A Super South Bridge instead of AMD's 756. Not that there's anything wrong with the 756, but AMD has made it a point, time and time again, to state that they will not continue in the chipset industry because they have much bigger fish to fry.

VIA's North Bridge and South Bridge will eventually be packaged together in the form of the KX133 chipset. The KX133 will bring AGP 4X support (which currently does very little) and 133MHz FSB support down to the Athlon. What does this mean? Well, AGP 4X, as we've already discovered, does very little for performance (current benchmarks show an overall improvement of 0.9%) but there are those that insist that as polygon rates and texture sizes increase, AGP 4X will become more and more of a necessity. Right now, it seems like AGP 4X is about as "necessary" as the transition from PCI to AGP was back in 1997. The thing to keep your eye on is the 133MHz FSB for the Athlon, using the EV6 bus protocol this will increase the system bus bandwidth to 2.1GB/s from the current 1.6GB/s and give a healthy boost to memory bandwidth as well.

DDR SDRAM support is an assumption that we've come to make when dealing with VIA chipsets, but unfortunately the technology is nothing but vaporware from the standpoint of the end user. Most likely, Virtual Channel SDRAM will be introduced to the Athlon platform. We are currently investigating the performance benefits VC SDRAM versus Intel's decision to move to RDRAM and the current PC100 & PC133 SDRAM platforms. Needless to say, the Athlon motherboards that hit the streets in the coming months will support your standard PC100/PC133 memory but will allow for a few performance oriented options to be taken.

Ultra ATA 66 is already supported by the AMD 756 South Bridge and the VIA 686A, and while there is not a doubt in the world that this little feature will be supported, the more important question seems to be, what else will the south bridge support? As we mentioned in our brief description of the FIC SD11, the 686A was originally used with the MVP3 chipset and features support for integrated hardware monitoring, and integrated Audio/Telephony codecs and thus an AMR slot.

The potential of AMR slots has yet to be taken advantage of, although it makes sense in theory.I It will be very rare that you see AMR slots as we know them taken advantage of. The theory behind AMR is that your CPU will be powerful enough to drive most of the peripherals you are unnecessarily spending loads of money on, so instead of buying a fully functional modem or sound card, why not rely on your CPU for the processing and pay less for a simple interface card. The future of AMR is obviously directed at cost efficient systems, but if you don't feel like spending $100 on a 3D audio card, then the addition may be of some use to you. Although we can't help but notice that most motherboards that do feature AMR support go ahead and use on-board hardware audio anyway.

The trend towards zero ISA slots is obviously upon us, and you should demand no less than 5 PCI slots. Ideally, an Athlon board with a 6 PCI + 1 AGP configuration would be perfect for future expansion.

Core voltage manipulation and FSB selection options are definitely demands that all tweakers should make, it can be done and it is being done by a few smaller motherboard manufacturers, so there is no reason for the big boys not to do the same. We're all waiting for ABIT to step in and produce the world's most overclockable Athlon motherboard like they did with the BX6 during the release of the BX chipset. One thing is for sure, if ABIT doesn't make the cut with the world's most overclockable Athlon motherboard, chances are, we won't be seeing their name in the lime light for much longer.