Athlon Pricing

CPU Prices

When determining if the Athlon is the right CPU for you, the first thing you usually consider is the price. In our informal price checking we found the Athlon to be anywhere from 7-15% less than a Pentium III at the same clock speed. In particular, it isn't hard to find the Athlon 500 for less than $230 and even the 600 MHz version can be easily found for less than $450. It's great to see a new CPU drop in price so rapidly, especially when it's based on a new architecture.

Athlon Motherboards

Once you've decided which Athlon CPU you want to buy, you'll next need to determine which motherboard is the best for you. Currently, motherboards from Biostar, FIC, Gigabyte, Microstar, (MSI) and Asus are available with varying amounts of difficulty, with the Asus K7M being the most desired among Athlon users. Another factor to consider when purchasing an Athlon system is the power supply. AMD strongly recommends the use of a 300W power supply from the approved list on their website.

Unfortunately, Athlon motherboards are currently a bit pricey. Asus K7M's for under $200 are hard to find online and even the more available FIC SD11 and MSI 6167 motherboards frequently range from $150-$195! Even Abit's BE6-II motherboard (which is considered to be one of the better BX-based boards) usually retails for around $150. Part of the problem lies in the costs associated with obtaining 200MHz parts for the EV6 bus, and an added cost is the current 6-layer design Athlon motherboards are built on. With the upcoming Apollo KX133 chipset, motherboard makers will be able to reduce their designs to 4-layers, which should reduce the cost for end users.

Athlon Systems

If the hassle of building a system is too much or you'd like a system with a solid warranty several companies are shipping Athlon systems. For the mainstream user, Compaq offers their Presario 5800 line of systems. In particular, the Presario 5888 ships with an Athlon 700, 128MB PC100 SDRAM, a 27GB HD, DVD and CD-RW drives, and a Voodoo3 video card for $2,199. For the more hardcore gamer, gaming PC manufacturer's such as GamePC and Falcon Northwest are both offering systems based on the Athlon processor. And for the extreme gamer, Kyrotech is (of course) offering their own super-cooled barebones Athlon systems at 800 and 900MHz starting at $2,000.