Weekly Memory & Motherboard Price Guide: November 2001 1st Edition

AMD Motherboards

Weekly Athlon/Duron (Socket-A) Motherboard Prices
Motherboard (Chipset)	Price	Change	Vendor	Shipping	CNet Pricing	Notes
ASUS A7V266 (VIA KT266)	$130		PeachPC	$11.99
Abit KG7-RAID (AMD 760)	$142		Atacom	$9
Abit KG7 (AMD 760)	$129		Accubyte	$12.50
ECS K75SA (SiS 735)	$57		Newegg.com	$9.90
EPoX 8KHA+ (VIA KT266A)	$107		Newegg.com	$9.90
FIC AD11 (AMD 760)	$93		Atacom	$9
MSI K7N420 Pro (NVIDIA nForce)	$185		PC Progress	See Site		Due late Nov.
Shuttle AK31 Revision 3.1 (VIA KT266A)	$81		Tufshop	$12
Tyan Tiger MP (AMD 760MP)	$206		Newegg.com	$9.90

The SiS 735 based ECS K75SA is still by far the most affordable upgrade platform available for the Athlon. Couple a $57 motherboard with a $32 stick of memory and a $30 processor and you've got a very powerful Duron machine for less than $120. The one thing to be careful with is that you should make sure you have a powerful power supply that can deliver a clean signal to the motherboard as we've noticed that the K75SA is a bit more sensitive to noisy signals than most motherboards (potentially because of the use of poorer quality voltage regulator circuitry).

For a small amount more, the Shuttle AK31 Revision 3.1 is available and offers even better performance and four usable DIMM slots. Be careful when using all four however since you must use very high quality memory and back down on memory timings (Crucial DDR SDRAM worked fine during our tests).

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