Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Components > Motherboards > Early Athlon Motherboard Review

Early Athlon Motherboard Review

1:02 PM - August 18, 1999 by Brent Kerby

1. Introduction
2. Is Intel Involved?
3. Praise The Three Musketeers!
4. AMD North Bridge And VIA South Bridge
5. The Contestants
6. The BIOS

7. Let's Start With The Award-BIOS Of Gigabite's 7IX
8. Last But Not Least There Is MSI's Award-BIOS
9. Test Setup
10. Business Application Performance
11. 3D Game Performance
12. 3D Game Performance Continued
13. Features

AMD's new high performance processor has now been released some 9 days ago and supposedly Athlon-systems have started shipping since. It's still close to impossible to get a single Athlon-CPU in any shop though, but this might hopefully change soon. It doesn't matter if you acquire a complete Athlon-system or you build one up yourself, the shiny new Athlon-processor requires a special motherboard. The 'Fester'-motherboards that AMD shipped with the Athlon review-systems will not be used in any commercial system, so that you as an end-user, OEM or system integrator will have to look for an Athlon-platform from one of the various motherboard makers.

There's Only Few Athlon Motherboards

Getting a motherboard may sound simple, but unfortunately the story is pretty far from simple in case of AMD's new Athlon. This review includes only four motherboards for the time being, and one of them is AMD's Fester-board, which was tested out of competition. You may think that Tom's Hardware Guide did a bad job in acquiring boards, but this is certainly not the case. As a matter of fact, there's only a minority of motherboard manufacturers that are actually offering Athlon-platforms right now, the minority is either quiet, or even announcing that they will not produce Athlon-motherboards for rather cheesy reasons.