Reinforcements: 6 New Athlon Boards With VIA's KT133A

VIA VT8363A / KT133A

First of all I'd like to suggest the lecture of our preceding articles dealing with VIA's renewed KT133A chipset:

Athlon Is Hot!

The most popular CPU socket today: AMD's Socket 462 for Athlon and Duron

Particularly the Athlon models beyond 800 MHz produce a lot of heat, which has to be discharged by proper CPU coolers. Two months ago we took a close look at 17 different models . Cooling is one of the most important things to pay attention to, especially as long as Athlon processors happen to encounter sudden heat deaths without adequate cooling. That means - in terms of Athlon systems - that you definitely should add the price for a proper CPU cooler to your cost planning, even if it means that you might have to take a slower model than you originally wanted.