AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 1: Motherboards

A Well Made Board

AMD has already proven to the market that with enough time and effort, a reliable Athlon motherboard can be produced. Case in point would be AMD’s Fester reference motherboard that the company supplied to all reviewers as well as some OEMs in order for them to evaluate the Athlon processor. The Fester may not have had all of the bells and whistles of the BX motherboards we have grown to be used to for the past year and a half, but it was stable, and it seems like with the first batch of Athlon motherboards, a stable board was just too much to ask.

The problem with all motherboards in general is that they need to get the job done (like the Fester) while keeping costs low enough to maintain a decent profit margin. The amount of profit a company can make on a single motherboard is not significant. Even if all of the overclockers in the world purchased a single motherboard the resulting profit would not be great enough to fuel an entire company. Large OEM deals are what keep motherboard manufacturers alive and the lack thereof puts many other manufacturers to an early death.

In order to succeed in this market, motherboard manufacturers tend to skimp on certain parts of the motherboard during the manufacturing process. Generally this does not effect the end user too greatly, but when you are dealing with a platform as sensitive as the Athlon, these areas that were skimped on become very noticeable and often times very annoying.

One of the major problems with the current crop of Athlon motherboards is the fact that they are having a difficult time supplying enough current to the AGP slot. The Athlon CPU itself consumes quite a bit of power, but once you add a current drawing AGP device such as a TNT2 Ultra, some motherboards have a difficulty supplying the necessary amount of current to the AGP device. When this happens the system simply crashes, and the user is left with a feeling of frustration towards their newly constructed system.

This problem could also be related to the power supply in your system, but we’ll be eliminating that possibility by using a unit known to be able to supply enough current to a loaded Athlon system. For a list of all power supplies capable of driving an Athlon system take a look at AMD’s recommended configuration page at: http://www1.amd.com/athlon/config

We tested to see which motherboards could deliver enough current to the AGP slot was by using a power supply (we actually used three different power supplies and tested to see which one worked best on the particular motherboard) that could normally run a TNT2 Ultra on an AMD Fester motherboard at 170/200MHz (core/mem) and a Diamond Viper V770 that could normally hit that 170/200MHz mark. We then increased the core clock speed of the TNT2 in 5MHz increments until it reached the 170MHz maximum of the card and recorded the maximum core frequency the system remained stable at. Stability was judged by the ability of the system to run through endurance test runs of Quake 3, Expendable, and Unreal Tournament.

It turned out that the ability of the motherboards to deliver enough current to the AGP slot was not as bad as we originally assumed from all of the horror stories around the web.  All four of the boards were able to hit 170/200 without any problems at all, pointing at another component of the system as the culprit for possible instability.  We will be discussing exactly what that component is in an upcoming part of this guide.