The Motherboard Of The Power Box
Right now the best performing core logic for the Athlon processor on the market is AMD's 760 chipset. It provides the 133 MHz processor bus clock of the new 'C'-type Athlons and supports DDR-SDRAM memory to supply the Athlon processor with high memory bandwidth. It was clear that the motherboard for the Power Box had to be an AMD 760 motherboard.
The best AMD760 motherboard I have tested to date is MSI's K7-Master S (MS-6341). It comes with
- AMD760 North Bridge
- VIA VT82c686B South Bridge with ATA100-Support
- Four DDR-SDRAM DIMM Slots, supporting up to 4 GB of memory
- 1 AGP Pro Slot
- 5 PCI Slots
- 1 CNR Slot (in case anyone cares)
- Onboard Adaptec AIC-7899 Dual-Channel SCSI-160 Adapter
In all my tests the K7-Master S has been performing flawlessly, providing top-notch reliability plus excellent performance. On top of that I found all overclocking requirements one could wish for in its BIOS setup, which are
- Adjustment of the core voltage up to 1.85 V
- Adjustment of the CPU clock multiplier up to x12.5
- Adjustment of the CPU bus clock in small increments.
There was no doubt that the Power Box would be equipped with this motherboard, which also allows the connection of super-fast SCSI-160 hard drives without the requirement of an additional adapter.
