Athlon Motherboard Review — THG.RU

Introduction

It’s only been a few months since we did our first Athlon motherboard review, Early Athlon Motherboard Review. At that time there were only three boards available for the AMD Athlon processor. Things still haven’t changed much. Even though the Athlon processor provides excellent performance and the demand is high for the product, still not many motherboard manufactures have jumped full-steam in to the development and or provide any type of marketing for their Athlon based motherboards (Slot-A). A person must look extremely hard on most of these manufacturers website’s to find any literature or promotion for their Athlon supported motherboards.

Athlon Supporters

So what is keeping motherboard manufactures so quiet or completely withheld from providing Slot-A motherboards? Could it be that the Athlon processor doesn’t provide enough performance for today’s computer users? I think not! Could it be that it costs a lot of money to build a system based on an Athlon processor? Nope! That ain’t it! I’m sure the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working hard to answer this question.

In our Early Athlon Motherboard Review there were only three players who supported the Athlon cause. Included in this list were First International Computer (FIC), Gigabyte, and Micro-Star International (MSI). This is a pretty small list if you compare the Athlon Slot-A supporters vs. the K6 Series Super Socket 7 supporters. Today we are happy to say there are two more motherboard manufactures we can add to the list. BIOSTAR proudly supports the new AMD processor with it’s M7MKA motherboard and also quietly yet not so proudly ASUS with it’s K7M motherboard. Don’t go rushing to ASUS’s public website because you will find zero information regarding their K7M motherboard.

Promoting the Non-Promoted

While visiting the five different motherboard manufacturers website’s to get their latest and greatest BIOS & Drivers I found that most of them don’t promote their Athlon motherboards. If you went to their main motherboard product page, most of the time, you had to do some serious digging to find any information or product specs for their Slot-A products. Only two of the motherboard manufacturers proudly supported their Athlon motherboards, BIOSTAR and FIC.

BIOSTAR has their M7MKA at the top of their Products page.

FIC is also proud of its SD11 with it at the top of their Motherboard Products page.

Promoting the Non-Promoted, Continued

Gigabyte doesn’t seem to find it important to have their 7IX Slot-A motherboard listed on their products page.

Looking at Gigabytes «Motherboards — BIOS & Utilities» you can notice that there isn’t a special section designated for the Athlon motherboard. While looking for the latest drivers I decided to check the «Other Motherboards» section.

Even though Gigabyte doesn’t show their 7IX on their products page they do have drivers for their motherboard in the «BIOS & Utilities for Other Motherboards» section.

Promoting the Non-Promoted, Continued

MSI also doesn’t find it important to include their Athlon based motherboard (MS-6167) on their products page.

At least MSI includes their MS-6167 BIOS & Drivers Updates in the same section as the rest of the motherboards.

Promoting the Non-Promoted, Continued

Even though both Gigabyte and MSI don’t include their Slot-A products in their products listing they do have drivers available for download. ASUS, however, doesn’t mention anything about their K7M nor provide BIOSs or drivers for it on their main web page. To get a hold of the K7M BIOS and Drivers you need to browse either ftp.asus.com.tw or ftp.asuscom.de and look under their respective PUB directories until you find the SLOT-A area.

ASUS doesn’t have a Slot-A section or any information on their K7M motherboard.

Where’s the «Slot A Motherboard BIOS Image Files»?

I decided to do a search on ASUS’s Web Pages for the «K7M» product to see what would come up.

Unfortunately, absolutely nothing was found!

Promoting the Non-Promoted, Continued

Next I searched the «ASUS Technical Support Newgroups (All Products).

Surprisingly enough there are quite a few posted messages regarding ASUS’s supposedly non-existent K7M product.

After going to every ASUS site we finally found two places where one can find updated BIOS & drivers for the ASUS K7M motherboard. Both the ASUS Taiwan (ftp.asus.com.tw) and ASUSCOM’s German FTP (ftp.asuscom.de) sites have BIOS and drivers. Hopefully, these two locations continue to allow access to these files.

Besides BIOSTAR and FIC no one else is promoting their Athlon based motherboards to the public. This is a major disadvantage for AMD. Not only is there only a hand full of motherboards available for the Athlon processor but also there is no marketing/promotion to back them up. Since not all of the motherboard manufacturers are promoting their Athlon supported motherboards, the best way I’ve found to locate them is using AMD’s website. In the Athlon section of their site you can find a list of motherboards that not only support the Athlon but also have been approved through AMD’s certification program.

Motherboard Features

Each of the boards offers a very similar set of features: 3 memory slots, AGP slot, 5 PCI slots, 2 serial, 1 parallel, PS2 mouse & keyboard, and two USB ports. Only two of the boards offer any kind of built in over-clockability. I will focus on the BIOSTAR and ASUS boards’ features in this section. Please refer to our Early Athlon Motherboard Review to get the low-down on the other motherboards.

The ASUS board is the only board that provides the new fangled AMR slot which is so very popular on Intel platforms. The AMR slot allows for the low-cost addition of a soft-modem or audio via a special codec equipped adaptor board. These AMR based adaptors utilize the CPU for there operation thus robbing bandwidth from the processor. For integrators this allows for a lower-cost system. For users who aren’t avid game players (on or offline) these AMR based adaptors will fit the bill.

Newer version of the K7M board available

I found out during the testing of boards in this review that ASUS has released a newer version of their K7M board. I tracked one of these puppy’s down and tried it out. The newer version (v1.04) offers the same performance and features as the older one (v1.02) except the new version offers two additional USB ports via a card edge connector. It looks like ASUS decided to make some improvements on their onboard power supply given the non-requirement of a huge heatsink for the regulators.

Update the BIOSTAR M7MKA BIOS!

For those of you who have or are going to consider purchasing the BIOSTAR board I highly recommend you make sure you have the latest BIOS. I had horrible stability problems until I flashed it with its newest version. I believe BIOSTAR made some adjustments to their memory signal strengths with their latest BIOS which in-turn took care of the problem.

Motherboard Pictures

The ASUS K7M revision 1.02

Notice the huge heatsink for the onboard power supply and the power connector.

The NEW! ASUS K7M revision 1.04

The revised K7M has obviously made major changes to the onboard power supply given the absence of the huge heatsink. Also the power connector has moved in between the CPU and memory slots.

The power connector is squeezed tightly between the CPU Heatsink/Fan and memory slots on the revised K7M.

BIOSTAR M7MKA Motherboard

Over-clockable Motherboards

Only two of the Athlon motherboards offer any type of over-clocking options. The MSI motherboard offers the ability to set the front side bus (FSB) to either 100MHz or 133MHz. Besides the fact that the AMD Northbridge doesn’t support a 133MHz speed this setting is pretty useless unless you find it likely that for example a 500MHz Athlon processor (best case scenario) can handle a 165MHz frequency increase without the aid of super cooling technology.

The ASUS K7M motherboard BIOS provides a plethora of FSB settings including 90MHz, 95MHz and 100MHz to 150MHz! I tried running the board at various FSB settings. Besides running SYSmark98 I also ran each FSB setting through several game demos to make sure the AGP bus was stable. The best I could get with an AGP based video adaptor installed in my platform was a FSB of 104MHz. This pushed my 700MHz Athlon to 735MHz. The limiting factor seemed to be the AGP bus. I had to plug in several V770U’s before the system would run stable through my 3D game test suite. The same held true when I used a 500MHz Athlon processor. With an AGP adaptor installed, 104MHz (Athlon 520MHz) was all she wrote.

I was curious to see if the AGP bus was indeed holding back my over-clocking efforts so I installed a PCI based TNT2. Sure enough I was able to boost the FSB an additional 4MHz to 108MHz. This gave my 500MHz Athlon an increase to 540MHz. Not bad at all. The ASUS K7M offers by far the best over-clockability.

Here is a screenshot of the ASUS K7M «Advanced Chipset Setup» where you can select the FSB frequency & memory timings.

Test Setup

Performance

We pushed each of these boards through our test suite just to make sure there weren’t any hidden performance issues. From our experience with Intel based platforms usually the performance delta is fairly minimal across various manufacturers motherboards. We included AMD’s own (not publicly available) Fester motherboard just for comparative purposes. Our test suite includes SYSmark98 (ran under Win98 & WinNT) to give us a since of business application performance, and to cover 3D graphics performance we ran Quake 3 Arena, Shogo, Descent 3, and Dogath Moore Zoological Gardens (DMZG). Each of the game titles were ran at both 640x480x16 and 1024x768x16. I only included the results for Descent 3 at 1024x768x16 only to show that at higher resolutions the video board becomes the bottleneck in turn causing all of the motherboards to achieve almost identical scores.

Business Application Performance under Windows 98SE

Well its no surprise that the AMD platform is the fastest of the bunch. AMD has the ability to be aggressive in their memory timings since they build their own platforms and have tight control on what will be plugged into it (their own seed units). While each of these boards performed similarly the MSI takes the top spot with a score of 297 while the mysterious ASUS K7M grabs second.

Business Application Performance under Windows NT

Under Windows NT the FIC board shows it’s stuff keeping up with the highly optimized AMD’s Fester motherboard. You can see quite a difference in the scores under NT. Both the MSI and Gigabyte platforms fall way behind the competition. I believe this delta is due to less-aggressive memory timing. Another thing I find peculiar is that the two motherboards (K7M & SD11) that use VIA’s southbridge are able to keep up with AMD’s reference board.

3D Application Performance

Typically I only do CPU and motherboard testing at the low resolution of 640x480x16. Many people question why I don’t include higher resolutions. The reason is quite simple and it will be reflected in the results. When the higher resolutions are used the graphics card quickly becomes the bottleneck in performance. You can see that the 1024x768x16 results do not vary much between each of the motherboards. Again, this is because the graphic board has become the bottleneck. From here on out we’ll leave higher resolution testing for graphics boards reviews and not motherboard and CPU performance comparisons.

Shogo Performance using DirectX 7.0

In the Shogo Fortress (DX7) 640x480x16 test, it is the BIOSTAR M7MKA that holds second place, rather than the ASUS K7M board

Descent 3 Performance using DirectX 7.0

Pretty boring! Because the video board is the major bottleneck each of the motherboards provide almost identical scores.

AMD’s Fester board holds the lead once again. This next fastest is the ASUS K7M which is only has a 1FPS advantage over the others. The Fester’s 4FPS lead over the rest of the pact is pretty considerable. I wish the motherboard manufacturers could at least provide the aggressive settings for us performance freaks.

Dogath Moor Zoological Gardens using DirectX 7.0

The difference in performance between each of the platforms in this test is pretty slim. However, the AMD Fester board holds top spot while the ASUS K7M almost keeps up.

Quake 3 Arena Performance using OpenGL

Looks familiar! The AMD board still holds the lead! The ASUS K7M barely edges out the rest of the competition.

Conclusion

Each of these motherboards provides performance relatively close to one another under Windows 98. Making a decision based on performance is negligible. However, using Windows NT, the performance benefits between some of the boards varied more than I expected. Both the FIC SD11 and ASUS K7M clearly outperformed the others under NT. Another interesting thing to point out is the performance delta between the shipping boards vs. AMD’s Fester motherboard. It is apparent that the publicly available motherboards are using very conservative settings in their BIOS. Hopefully each of these motherboard manufacturers will go back through their BIOS and try and squeeze as much performance as their design will allow them. I’m excited to see that a couple more manufactures have decided to support the Athlon effort. It’s still quite puzzling to me why some of these companies aren’t promoting their Athlon products. In ASUS’s case, they quietly designed a motherboard without their name anywhere on the product nor have any information on their website about it. If you are going to build and ship a product, it only makes sense to promote it!

It’s a tough decision for me to pick which board I would consider purchasing. Each board ran without a hitch throughout all my testing. They all provided fairly comparable performance. Out of all the boards I tested I am most fond of the ASUS K7M because of its over-clocking feature. My only problem with this board is who will support it. Currently there are only two places where I can get the latest and greatest BIOS and drivers. And on these sites (ftp.asuscom.de and ftp.asus.com.tw) have them tucked away on an FTP site in an inconvenient location for an end-user. And who can say that they will still be there a week or month from now. If they decide to remove the files where will I get updated BIOS and drivers? Purchasing the K7M seems like a gamble given the drivers are not located on ASUS’s public web page. This is a shame given the performance and features the ASUS K7M offers. I wish ASUS would just come out and support their K7M product. If so I would highly recommend this motherboard for Athlon customers. My hats of to both BIOSTAR and FIC for proudly promoting their Athlon supported platforms. Hopefully, the rest of these motherboard manufacturers will muster up enough courage to do the same!