Next Generation Motherboard Platforms - Part 1: The Athlon Craze

The board design is derived from the reference Fester model but, one clear difference is that there are only four switching voltage regulators behind the Slot-A as opposed to the eight found on both the Gigabyte 7IX and the MSI 6167. Although we originally speculated that this was isolated to our test board we have confirmed that SD11 boards that are available for sale are shipping with only four regulators versus the eight on the rest of the boards.

It wasn't a surprise that there was a huge difference in the stability and power supply compatibility of the SD11 (especially with higher clocked Athlon processors) than the other boards we've looked at. We're currently awaiting an updated sample of the SD11 before pursuing any more stability tests regarding the motherboard.

The same four toroidal inductors are placed across from the four voltage regulators which, unlike the Gigabyte, are outfitted with heatsinks. A standard BX heatsink covers up the AMD 751 North Bridge which is supplemented by the VIA 686A Super South Bridge. The 686A Super South Bridge should be familiar to us all because of its presence in the latest of MVP3 motherboards.

Originally introduced with the VIA MVP4, the 686A Super South Bridge provides for AMR support, on-board hardware monitoring, and Ultra ATA 66 (as does the AMD 756 South Bridge). The inclusion of the 686A does not compromise nor enhance stability or performance in any way, but this decision is a very important one which we will discuss a little later, so keep it in the back of your head as you read on.

The board does not seem to work well with Athlon processors faster than 650MHz and, although, this should be easy to fix with a minor BIOS upgrade, we have yet to see one (other than the latest upgrade that adds the two new FSB settings). Considering the release of the Athlon 700 is just around the corner (and we mean just around the corner), a BIOS update/fix would be nice.

The SD11 also only features two fan connectors, both of which are located around the Slot-A connector, which is good if you are running a dual fan setup on your processor but, it isn't ideal for more than two fans for obvious reasons.