AMD Athlon Buyer's Guide - Part 1: Motherboards

The Gigabyte 7IX very closely resembles AMD's own Fester board in its layout and design, the only visual differences being the number of expansion slots and the quantity and rating of the capacitors on the board.  Needless to say, the board performed very similar to the reference Fester board in our tests. 

The system was unable to hit 800MHz at any core voltage and was unable to reach 750MHz with a core voltage lower than 1.75v.

The Microstar 6167 was one of the first Athlon motherboards to be released and upon its release was said to be a board that very closely resembled the 7IX from Gigabyte, which in turn closely resembles the Fester, notice a pattern here?  The 6167 is slightly more stable in the Quick Stability Tests and managed to boot into Windows at 800MHz (1.85v) as well as at 750MHz with a 1.70v core.

The SD11 came in last place in all of our Stability Tests.  While the board itself is capable of running an Athlon 700, it failed to run our overclocked CPU at any core voltage less than 1.70v.  

This is the board we've all been waiting for but how stable is it?  In contrast to the SD11, the K7M came in first place in all of our stability tests.  While it still wasn't capable of running the Athlon at 800 at a voltage below 1.85v, it managed to run our 600MHz Athlon at 750MHz at its default voltage of 1.60v.