AMD Athlon Socket A Motherboards (Abit, AOpen, AsusTek, FIC, Gigabyte, Microstar MSI)
At the time, a Pentium III motherboard running at 350MHz may have seemed all you’d ever need, just like 640KB of memory was once ‘more than enough’. But things have moved on. It’s time to upgrade.
Buying a new motherboard and processor will not only give you the opportunity to improve your overall system speed, but it will also bring your hardware bang up to date. The latest boards support faster hard drive connections, have capacity for new RAM running at higher speeds and include features like 4x AGP to support the new generation of graphics cards. The latest chipsets can give you onboard sound and better connectivity and the BIOS should also bring you up to date with support for new devices.
If you’ve been having trouble installing new hardware, especially with a new operating system, then the latest boards are usually more accommodating, with the ability to share interrupts and other resources. You may even have the situation where your old board is so full of cards that you have to switch off some devices, like a second serial port or USB support, in order to allocate sufficient resources to use them all. A new motherboard can help solve that problem, too, via built-in components and resource-sharing.
The other gain is performance. We’ve chosen a selection of boards that support the latest Athlon chips from AMD. They offer good value for money and now use the new Socket A connection. In our tests, we found the 1.2GHz Athlon processor outperformed all Pentium 3 processors from Intel and was even faster than the latest Pentium 4 running at 1.5GHz. Most of these boards are designed to work at higher speeds than the recent 1.2GHz chips, so you should have some degree of future-proofing built in.
In each of the following reviews, we’ve pointed out some of the more interesting features of each board. You’ll find more detailed product specification in the Features table.