Other Announced Boards
A plethora of boards were announced simultaneously with the launch of the Thunderbird at Computex 2000 on June 5. While those boards were not available for this preview, we'd like to briefly mention a few notable products that are on the way.
ASUS has their A7V, the successor to the popular K7V, our favorite Athlon motherboard. Unique features of the A7V include an AGP Pro slot and an optional Promise Ultra ATA 100 controller.
MSI's second Socket-A board, the K7T Master, is already being readied. The K7T Master adds AGP Pro and on-board SCSI, a first for an Athlon motherboard.
QDI has announced a Socket-A motherboard, the KinetiZ 7T, that allows breaking of the Thunderbird / Duron multiplier lock by using pins labeled as "reserved" in AMD's documentation. Not much else is known about this board at the moment, but if this ability is truly available, the KinetiZ 7T will be a huge success among overclockers.
Summary
Those are the 5 boards that arrived in the AnandTech lab in time for the Thunderbird review. We'll have many more Socket-A motherboard previews, and much much more, in our Computex 2000 coverage next week. Of course, we'll have complete Socket-A motherboard reviews and a roundup as soon as production boards are available.
Unlike the Slot-A motherboard market, the Socket-A processors from AMD should be very well supported from the start. The motherboard manufacturers no longer fear Intel's wrath and are simply producing the best Socket-A products they can. With Thunderbird running neck and neck with the Pentium III and Duron set to trounce the Celeron, Intel could be in quite a bit of trouble very soon.
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