AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 1: Motherboards

As we alluded to earlier, the Athlon draws a significant amount of current and thus puts a great amount of stress on the motherboard’s ability to supply current to the CPU. The successfulness of a motherboard in this arena is dependent entirely on the number, quality and capacitance rating of capacitors around the Slot-A connector, the physical design of the motherboard, and the quality of the manufacturing process.

At the same time, motherboard manufacturers receive specifications and sample parts that help to inform them on how much current the Athlon CPU will draw at the various clock speeds. They use this information when they put together the supported CPUs list. So as long as a motherboard officially supports the speed of Athlon that you will be using then you should be fine, right?

The manufacturers guarantee minimum operation and support for the processors while operating within their original specifications which translates into no guarantees for overclocking. With more and more Athlons modified for overclocking purposes becoming commonplace, and voltage tweaking becoming a reality, the current demands on the motherboards increase. For tweakers looking to get the most out of their setups, a poorly designed motherboard could limit your success here as well.

In order to test this facet of motherboard quality we took the same setup from before, using the same power supplies and fired up the machine. We used a 600MHz Athlon that was known to work at 750MHz at 1.80v on the Fester board and tried it at that speed on all of the motherboards to see whether or not it would operate in a stable manner. In order to make sure that the L2 cache was not the limiting factor, the L2 cache was clocked at 1/3 of the CPU’s clock frequency and not the normal half, thus keeping it below the 300MHz rated frequency.

We ran two separate tests, a Quick Stability Test and an Endurance Test.  The Quick Stability Test was simply a measure of whether or not the system would successfully boot into Windows.  The Endurance Test was a looped run of BAPCo's SYSMark 98.