Athlon Motherboard Roundup - March 2000

One of the advantages the KX133 holds over the AMD 750 is that it boasts AGP 4X support while the latter only features AGP 2X support.  Currently, the performance difference between AGP 4X and AGP 2X is negligible, partially because of the fact that even with its PC133 SDRAM support, the KX133 chipset doesn’t have enough memory bandwidth to saturate the 1.06GB/s AGP 4X bus. 

Of the eleven motherboards featured in this roundup, just about half of them feature the KX133 chipset and thus boast support for AGP 4X transfer rates.  Of those five, one board, the ASUS K7V-RM, features an AGP Pro slot, which seems a bit odd to have on an Athlon motherboard especially considering the incredible amount of power consumed by Athlon CPUs. 

In ASUS’ case, the reason the K7V-RM features an AGP Pro slot as opposed to a regular AGP slot is seemingly because ASUS has moved their entire line of AGP 4X compliant motherboards to AGP Pro, and it didn’t hurt to use one on the board.  But considering, once again, the amount of power drawn by the Athlon CPU itself, it wouldn’t make much sense to attempt to run an AGP Pro50 card on the board at full load.