| Product: |
Abit KA7 |
| Date: |
05/07/00 (126 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good Board
Disadvantages: Soon to be obsolete
I agree with Gah and Guybrush who both put forward the opinion that the Abit board is the best motherboard for Athlons currently, but if I was thinking about buying an Athlon chip and board (which i am!) I would wait for a short while as soon these boards will be obsolete!
Please bear with me as the reason for this centres around the AMD chips.
Currently AMD are releasing their Duron chips (the AMD competitor for the Intel Celerons)in what is know as Socket A format rather than the Slot A format which Athlons currently are manufactured in. The Athlons will be switched to Socket A format within the next 6 months
The reasons for these are manifold and technical but the real crux of the matter is the L2 cache/chip size and the weight of Athlons currently running in the UK. As the speed increases the frequency of the cache actually decreases.
The past few Athlon processor releases have been a tad disappointing, not because their performance wasn't up to par with the rest of the Athlon line, since they were, but mostly because, with every increase in clock speed, there seemed to be a drop in the L2 cache frequency of the processor.
The Athlon 700 was the last Athlon to feature a 1/2 L2 cache divider, which placed the processor's 512KB of L2 cache running at a whopping 350MHz, the highest L2 cache speed the Athlon would ever see.
The Athlon 750 – 850 featured a 2/5 L2 cache divider that resulted in L2 cache speeds ranging from 300MHz to 340MHz and more recently, the 900 – 1GHz parts were ashamed to boast a 1/3 L2 cache divider that kept the L2 cache frequency between 300MHz and 333MHz.
Basically, while the Athlon has increased in clock speed from the 500, 550, and 600MHz parts to the 900, 950 and 1GHz parts the processor's L2 cache frequency has never peaked above 350MHz.
To increase the size of the cache and improve the frequency problems, AMD have had to make the chip bigger and
include it 'on-die' ie. on the chip itself, this has been code named 'Thunderbird' and will be shipped in Socket A format, which getting to the point, is not compatiable with the KX133 chipset but is compaible with the AMD 750, to get around this Via has released a new chipset called the KT133 so watch out for these chipsets as they are compatible with both the Duron and the new 'Thunderbird' Athlons
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