Athlon Motherboard Roundup - March 2000

With the Athlon platform being much more of a power hog than the Intel solutions we’ve been used to (the Athlon 800 consumers 48W of power, the 850 consumes over 50W.  In comparison, the Pentium III 800 consumes a little over 26W), stability is key to the success of any Athlon motherboard.  Being able to supply enough current to the CPU as well as the AGP slot and memory banks is very important, and thus the closer a manufacturer follows AMD’s or VIA’s reference design, the more successful they are likely to be. 

As with the latest crop of i820 motherboards, there will be no Athlon motherboards produced using the AT form factor.  Even if a manufacturer decided to put together an AT motherboard for the Athlon, chances are that most AT power supplies wouldn’t be able to supply the power required by the Athlon.  Instead, the Athlon platform will be almost exclusively ATX with a few exceptions.

The standard ATX form factor is by far the most popular and will be the most prominent in the Athlon motherboard market, simply because it tailors to the market the Athlon is targeted at, desktop users.  But because of the new 4-layer PCB designs inspired by AMD’s own design and VIA’s reference KX133 design, you can also expect to see a number of microATX Athlon motherboards aimed at the high-performance, low-end market. 

In spite of the Athlon’s superior architecture, which would naturally be geared towards a professional level workstation environment, chances are that we won’t see any WTX form factor Athlon motherboards in the next 6 – 8 months.  The main goal from VIA has been to produce cost effective chipset solutions to the desktop market, not to infringe on their competitors in the high-end workstation/server markets.  While they may eventually be thrust into this category as the Athlon evolves into a high-end workstation/server solution as well as a desktop solution, it won’t be a process that will be taking place in the immediate future. 

The size of Athlon motherboards isn’t that important of a consideration, although we have encountered some relatively large motherboards in the past few months such as the FIC SD-11 and the AOpen AK72.  In these situations, you’ll obviously want to make sure that you have a case large enough to accommodate the motherboard without making any sacrifices such as inaccessible DIMM slots, etc… 

The layout of Athlon motherboards is a very big deal simply because there is an overwhelming tendency of motherboard manufacturers to place the ATX power connector in the space between the Slot-A connector and the memory banks.  Depending on the particular unit, this may obstruct the installation of some heatsink/fan combos, which has forced a number of cooling manufacturers to manufacture products with this specifically taken into account.

Since the Athlon generates so much heat, you definitely don’t want to sacrifice cooling efficiency because your cooling solution doesn’t fit as a result of a poorly placed ATX power connector.