After the positive buzz generated by our AMD Athlon CPU reviews last week, Sharky Extreme decided to pursue the companies providing the first mainboards for the new chip, in order to evaluate their board's competitiveness level. Our first entry, and likely the first mainboard that will hit the market, is the GA-7IX from Gigabyte.

Gigabyte is one of the larger mainboard manufacturers on the island of Taiwan, and each of the products we've reviewed from the company has impressed us with its stability and robust featuresets.

Today, a new generation of Gigabyte products is being launched in the form of the GA-7IX, as it will be the first of several Athlon-supporting mainboards Gigabyte will release over the next several months.

Let's take a look at the mainboard that will likely propel a large portion of the Athlon-based PCs that will be sold this year.

Although AMD manufactured and produced the mainboards that were equipped in each of the Athlon evaluation machines used by the press for reviews last week, they have no intention of continuing this process and instead have recruited six mainboard manufacturing partners to produce Athlon boards.

FIC, Gigabyte, ASUS, Biostar, MSI, and GVC have all committed to supplying Slot-A compatible mainboards for the Athlon CPU, and each will likely debut their first boards over the next two months. Although these boards will differ in some minute ways, they each will utilize AMD's internally developed 750 mainboard AGP 2X core logic chipset.

Eventually ALi, VIA, and SiS will take over production of the Athlon compatible mainboard core logic chipsets, and will likely be introducing more advanced features than the capable AMD-750 chipset includes now, such as AGP 4X and 133MHz SDRAM support.

When will these new chipsets arrive on the market mounted on Athlon mainboards? After returning home from a trip to Taiwan just last week, Sharky Extreme staffers indicated that leading Athlon mainboard producers expected the introduction dates for these "second generation" Athlon mainboards would not be before late December of 1999. For now, the AMD-750 chipset will be utilized in each of the Athlon supporting mainboards being produced by the six vendors we mentioned previously.