On Tue, 06 Feb 2001 14:47:31 -0500, Andrew J Jenkins wrote:

....snip...

>WRT Athalon systems, it sounds like you know what you're doing.
>
>Someone in the list (Robbi Bittler: subj "AMD motherboards") has been 
>querying about the availability of dual-Athalon motherboards. Since you've 
>built several Athalon-based CAD stations during the last few months, and 
>it's likely that you've done your homework hardware specifications, setup 
>tweaks, driver conflicts, and so forth,  do you have anything to add on 
>that issue? Your was not one of the voices that popped up to support him, 
>and I was thinkin' that since you're building CAD stations, you probably 
>are somewhat expert in the area, and therefore you might have just missed 
>his post and so didn't reply.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>aj
>

Thanks Andrew... I'm not sure how much of an expert I am, but I am a hardware 
engineer and have taken an interest in the AMD systems and done a little 
research.

My best advice to anyone considering an AMD system -- especially if you are 
going to build one -- is to visit www.AMDZone.com. It's a site dedicated to AMD 
hardware. There are a lot of very knowledgeable users there and the site covers 
everything from AMD news, motherboards, drivers, tweaks, memory, cooling, power 
supplies, you name it. They have a very good user forum with lots of traffic 
and you will get good opinions and answers regarding almost any subject AMD 
related. You can get a very good idea of what combinations of hardware, 
software and drivers works well by browsing the threads there.

My overall take on the Athlon motherboards is that the VIA KT133 chipset 
(100/200MHz FSB, PC133 RAM) systems are in their 2nd and 3rd revisions and are 
very stable now. The KT133A (133/266MHz FSB) motherboards are newer, but also 
quite stable as well, since they are a basically the same as the KT133 with a 
FSB speedup for the new Athlons that support the 133/266MHz FSB.

The DDR boards are still in their infancy and there doesn't appear to be a 
clear leader in the pack yet. They all have some warts still, but most will be 
fixed by minor board revisions and Bios updates. So far the KT133A systems with 
PC133 memory have performed very close (within about 5-15%) to the DDR 
motherboards in the memory benchmarks I've seen. In all other areas, the 
systems are about equal in performance.

The Dual CPU boards have not been released by motherboard vendors due to AMD 
being late to release their 760MP chipset. Rumors are that there are a few 
small bugs AMD is ironing out and that they DO NOT want to release a buggy 
chipset a la the i820 fiasco Intel had a while back. The dual CPU boards should 
be showing up in the next couple months though, since information on 
engineering versions is starting to pop up on the internet (referenced in some 
earlier posts). I expect it will take a couple months after they start showing 
up in volume for a few Bios revisions to take care of any little compatibility 
issues that show up. That's pretty normal for any new technology, but the dual 
CPU boards look VERY promising.

I can however recommend a few manufacturers that consistently have produced 
excellent Athlon motherboards: Abit (my favorite -- lots of options for 
tweaking, though not inexpensive), MSI (very stable, reasonably priced), Asus 
(good performance, features), and Epox (less expensive, but still very good 
quality). 

All of these manufacturers are making very high quality, high performance 
Athlon Socket A motherboards right now. They all have great performance and are 
very well designed. Look for the popular models from these manufacturers that 
have the features you want, fit your price, and you can't really go wrong.

BTW, I never did receive the response I posted earlier -- the listserver has 
been kind of flaky here today. I guess by YOUR response, at least some people 
did... ;-)

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems



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