Asus K7M

The first Athlon motherboards on the market were featureless, faceless drab. Early boards from MSI and Biostar features nothing but the usual configuration often seen on a cheap BX-based motherboard. The next generation, however, promises some very exciting things. The K7M comes loaded with 5 PCI slots, 1 ISA, 1 AGP, and 3 DIMMs... this is the standard configuration for most Athlon motherboards. Other notable features include onboard audio, 4 USB ports (more on this later), an audio/modem riser port, ATA/66, JumperFree BIOS, PC 99 compliance, overclockability, and a whole truckload of capacitors. Since the Asus K7M deviates from the Fester design by ...

The Asus K7M, when I bought it, was widely regarded as the best avaliable board for the AMD K7-1 and K7-2 processors (slot A type). This is a reputation that, in my opinion, it deserved. Not only is it rock-solid stable, but it has a useful ability to scale up the FSB speed to 133MHz, enabling overclocking to a limited extent, although if you want to do this seriously, I would recommend getting a dedicated overclocking card. The board I got was the 'plain' board - that is, one without the on-board audio kit, as I already had a reasonable sound card. However, I am told that this is not of unreasonable qualiy, given that it is merely intended as a ...