De Athlon moederborden reviews beginnen nu langzaam op gang te komen. Bij Sharky Extreme vind je er nu een van de Gigabyte GA-7IX. Hier heb je wat uit de intro, klik hier voor de rest.
Although AMD manufactured and produced the mainboards that were equipped in each of the Athlon evaluation machines used by the press for reviews last week, they have no intention of continuing this process and instead have recruited six mainboard manufacturing partners to produce Athlon boards.FIC, Gigabyte, ASUS, Biostar, MSI, and GVC have all committed to supplying Slot-A compatible mainboards for the Athlon CPU, and each will likely debut their first boards over the next two months. Although these boards will differ in some minute ways, they each will utilize AMD's internally developed 750 mainboard AGP 2X core logic chipset.
Eventually ALi, VIA, and SiS will take over production of the Athlon compatible mainboard core logic chipsets, and will likely be introducing more advanced features than the capable AMD-750 chipset includes now, such as AGP 4X and 133MHz SDRAM support.
When will these new chipsets arrive on the market mounted on Athlon mainboards? After returning home from a trip to Taiwan just last week, Sharky Extreme staffers indicated that leading Athlon mainboard producers expected the introduction dates for these "second generation" Athlon mainboards would not be before late December of 1999. For now, the AMD-750 chipset will be utilized in each of the Athlon supporting mainboards being produced by the six vendors we mentioned previously.
