Weekly Memory & Motherboard Price Guide: April 2001 2nd Edition

Prices for a good number Socket-A motherboards this week have fallen including some KT133 and DDR boards and most KT133A and KM133 boards. As we mentioned in our recent Socket-A roundup, the KT133A does quite well in performance tests considering the current needs of applications and games. However, as these applications and games become more demanding, the need for a higher memory bandwidth solution will become evident. But since that time is yet to come, if you're looking for a great KT133A motherboard, consider the Iwill KK266 which we applauded for it's exceptional overall performance.

Though KM133 boards include integrated video, the performance from Gigabyte's GA-7ZMM is below par thus we cannot recommend any boards from this platform.

From the DDR bunch, the more expensive AMD 760-based motherboards will be the highest performing Socket-A solution for some time as we said in our Socket-A comparison. As you can see, the ASUS A7M266 and Gigabyte GA-7DXC have come down nicely in price. Ali Magik 1-based boards are still not mature enough to earn our recommendation. New to our Socket-A DDR bunch is the MSI K7T Pro266 motherboard based on the VIA KT266 chipset which we found to be not as high performing as the AMD 760, but much better than the Ali Magik 1. However, the KT133A outperforms the KT266 in benchmarks and needs more maturing like the ALi Magik 1 so we recommend against buying it at this point in time.