Hareware Reviews

Once upon a time, you bought a new motherboard purely as a home for your shiny new processor, and although that may still be true for most people, today’s motherboard designs have so many features that it’s possible to keep your old processor and completely upgrade your system just by swapping the motherboard for one with more features.

For example, more and more motherboard manufacturers are bringing out motherboards with integrated RAID, 5.1 audio, and USB2.0 and in the case of MSI, even integrated Bluetooth support.

At the moment, the AMD Athlon XP+ is losing out in the performance race to Intel’s “Northwood” Pentium 4, and to combat this, chipset manufacturers have quickly developed chipsets that support the latest and fastest speed of DDR memory - PC2700 or DDR333. Having said that, the full benefit of PC2700 for AMD chips won’t be recognised until the FSB of the processor moves up to 166MHz from its present 133MHz.

The latest chipset for AMD’s Socket A processors - Athlon, Athlon XP and Duron - is from VIA Technologies, the KT333. This isn’t a completely new design, but rather an update of VIA’s very successful KT266A chip. What’s been added is a new memory controller which adds DDR333 support to the existing DDR200 and DDR266 memory options. ATA/133 support has also been added thanks to the updated VT8233C Southbridge.

Here we take a look at seven of the latest Socket A boards that incorporate VIA’s new chipset, to see just how much can be crammed onto one PCB. All the boards can handle every Socket A processor in the AMD range, so all that matters is the surrounding spec.