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I admit, I was pretty excited when this motherboard arrived in the mail from eyo. Unless you've been living in a cave for the last 3 months you can't have helped hear about the storm the AMD Athlon processor is making. Many of the hardware review sites are filled with breathless articles about how fantastic it is, the world's first 7th-generation CPU, how Intel had better sit up and take notice etc etc. Now, having the fastest CPU in the universe may be fine for some people, but if it's still running at the speed the manufacturer ships it at.. well, I dunno about you, but I feel a little cheated. Until now, the overclocking options for the Athlon were restricted to the multiplier, and that required cracking the CPU case open and doing some surface-mount soldering of the CPU itself. Riiiiiiight. Why, I hear you ask, has nobody made an Athlon motherboard that lets you change the front-side bus speed, like so many BX-chipset-based boards? Well, now they have. Enter the K7M.

click for a bigger pic

Incidentally, you'll note there is no mention of the manufacturer of this board anywhere in this review. The manufacturer has asked to not be associated with the board. There's no mention of it on their website. Even the motherboard box is plain white with no manufacturer info on it. The manual only mentions them in the small-print copyright notice. This odd behaviour lends some strength to the rumours that Intel may be strong-arming manufacturers who support their biggest competitor, AMD. Furthermore, because this board allows overclocking, it does not conform to AMD's reference model for Athlon boards and hence is not on their approved hardware list. So it's something of an orphan. As it happens, pretty much everyone knows who made this board now anyway, but I still can't tell you. Strange days indeed.

The first thing I noticed when taking the board out of the static bag was the huge capacitors near the Slot-A connector. This is, of course, where the Athlon plugs into the board. Now, we're used to seeing large capacitors along the Slot-1 connector of BX-chipset-based boards, but these make those look like tic-tacs. Bad news for anyone wanting to mount a sandwich cooler on their Athlon - although, the core is fairly high above the slot on the Athlon, so you may be able to get away with it. These capacitors provide a store of power for the processor - when it experiences a spike of heavy usage it can draw the extra power out of the capacitors until the voltage regulator starts feeding it the power it needs. The size of these capacitors, plus the repeated warnings in the user manual that you must have AT LEAST a 250W power supply, indicate that the Athlon is truly a power-hungry beast. The manual says that there should be a special curvy heatsink included, for the end-user to stick over the voltage regulator chips. The manual goes on to warn of the dire consequences of using the board without the heatsink fitted. However, it was not included with the board I got. I checked back with the manufacturer - the review unit is revision 1.04 and apparently it does not require the VR heatsink anymore. That'll teach me to read the manual.

Speaking of which, despite perhaps not being up to date with the latest revisions, the manual is excellent. The general trend these days seems to be to include a very minimal quick-start guide on paper, with the full documentation on CD-ROM. This is fine if you're an experienced user or have another machine available, but I much prefer to have the full manual within reach, especially when dealing with a bag full of potential unknowns like an Athlon-based system. This manual is very well written in clear language, full of diagrams, screenshots and explanations of everything from inserting the CPU cartridge to installing the included MIDI software.