Conclusion
Each of these motherboards provides performance relatively close to one another under Windows 98. Making a decision based on performance is negligible. However, using Windows NT, the performance benefits between some of the boards varied more than I expected. Both the FIC SD11 and ASUS K7M clearly outperformed the others under NT. Another interesting thing to point out is the performance delta between the shipping boards vs. AMD's Fester motherboard. It is apparent that the publicly available motherboards are using very conservative settings in their BIOS. Hopefully each of these motherboard manufacturers will go back through their BIOS and try and squeeze as much performance as their design will allow them. I'm excited to see that a couple more manufactures have decided to support the Athlon effort. It's still quite puzzling to me why some of these companies aren't promoting their Athlon products. In ASUS's case, they quietly designed a motherboard without their name anywhere on the product nor have any information on their website about it. If you are going to build and ship a product, it only makes sense to promote it!
It's a tough decision for me to pick which board I would consider purchasing. Each board ran without a hitch throughout all my testing. They all provided fairly comparable performance. Out of all the boards I tested I am most fond of the ASUS K7M because of its over-clocking feature. My only problem with this board is who will support it. Currently there are only two places where I can get the latest and greatest BIOS and drivers. And on these sites (ftp.asuscom.de and ftp.asus.com.tw ) have them tucked away on an FTP site in an inconvenient location for an end-user. And who can say that they will still be there a week or month from now. If they decide to remove the files where will I get updated BIOS and drivers? Purchasing the K7M seems like a gamble given the drivers are not located on ASUS's public web page. This is a shame given the performance and features the ASUS K7M offers. I wish ASUS would just come out and support their K7M product. If so I would highly recommend this motherboard for Athlon customers. My hats of to both BIOSTAR and FIC for proudly promoting their Athlon supported platforms. Hopefully, the rest of these motherboard manufacturers will muster up enough courage to do the same!
