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When it comes to performance motherboards, the top name on many people’s lips would be Asus. Since cutting their eyeteeth on early Socket 7 overclocking boards, Asus has attained a level of name recognition alongside the most high-profile hardware manufacturers. Although many associate Abit with starting the CPU overclocking craze, it was Asus that actually pioneered the term. Their P55T2P4 Socket 7 motherboard was all the rage for Pentium and K6 overclocking and their innovative 75 and 83 MHz bus speeds took the hobby PC market by storm. The P55T2P4 really made Asus a household name and many a hardware website gained instant notoriety by reviewing and overclocking this motherboard.

Asus doesn’t seem satisfied being simply a major player in the motherboard market, and the company has branched out in many other areas. The line of Asus Nvidia TNT2 and GeForce cards have been hugely successful and the huge presence of the Asus brand in retail outlets testifies to this fact. Notebooks, DVD-ROM and CD-ROM are also hardware areas that Asus has made some in-roads, though they have not enjoyed the incredible growth of their 3D-accelerator line.

Still, the bread and butter of Asus remains its high quality motherboards and they have really started to ramp up their influence in the Athlon market. Everyone knows all about the hugely popular Asus P3V4X (Apollo Pro 133) and P3B-F (Intel BX) Slot 1 motherboards, but Asus also produced the popular K7M and K7M-RM Athlon motherboards. These boards were really their first foray into the Athlon motherboard market. Both K7M products are based on the standard AMD-751 chipset, and while it was and still is a capable chipset, it was missing several important features, such as PC133 and AGP 4X.