Compatibility

The number one question on current Athlon owners' minds is the compatibility of Palomino with today's Socket A motherboards. To resolve this question we tested our Athlon MP processor with a handful of Socket A motherboards from such manufacturers as ABIT, ASUS, FIC, Gigabyte and MSI. We've provided the following table summarizing our results:

	Chipset	BIOS Revision	Worked Properly?	Identified CPU?
ABIT KT7-RAID	KT133	ZT	Yes	No ("Athlon")
ABIT KT7A-RAID	KT133A	ZT	Yes	No ("Athlon")
ASUS A7V133	KT133A	1005A	Yes	Yes ("Athlon H")
ASUS A7A266	ALiMAGiK1	1004	No	No
ASUS A7M266	AMD-760	1004A	Yes	Yes ("Athlon H")
FIC AD11	AMD-760	ABA42	Yes	No ("Athlon")
FIC AZ11EA	KT133A	VDC45	Yes	No ("Athlon")
Gigabyte GA-7ZXR 2.2	KT133A	F7A	Yes	No ("Athlon")
Gigabyte GA-7VTX	KT266	F3	Yes	No ("Athlon")
MSI K7T Turbo-R	KT133A	turbov28	No	No
MSI K7T 266 Pro	KT266	Ver. 1.3	Yes	Yes ("Athlon 4")

As you can see, both of ABIT's VIA-based motherboards ran with our Palomino chip, but neither properly recognized its core. Both the ASUS A7M266 and A7V133 recognized the chip and worked with the Palomino installed (the only motherboards to accomplish both), but WCPUID and SiSoft Sandra TE failed to recognize Palomino's SSE instruction support.

Both of Gigabyte and FIC's PC133 and DDR boards worked with Palomino, although in the case of the GA-7ZXR 2.2, stability was below the level of the other motherboards we tested. It's possible that the beta nature of the BIOS we used was partially to blame, but we didn't have time to look into the issue further. In our tests, MSI's K7T Turbo-R and ASUS' A7A266 failed to run properly with Palomino, and we'll be updating the article with A7M266 results shortly.

Overall the stability of the other motherboards was pretty good, but not quite up to the same level of stability as traditional Thunderbird processors under extreme stress testing. However, considering the early nature of our tests, it's surprising to see so many motherboards working at all.

Keep in mind that while all this is a positive indication that the above boards will work with upcoming desktop Palomino processors, we cannot completely verify this, as the chip still hasn't been released. In particular, question marks still remain on the thermal power requirements for desktop Palomino. While mobile Palomino requires a voltage of 1.4V, Athlon MP needs 1.75V to run properly at 1.2GHz. Since desktop Palomino will be offered at speeds greater than 1.4GHz, core voltage could certainly be higher than 1.4V when the processor debuts.

Dealing with heat

In terms of cooling, Palomino doesn't require anything out of the ordinary. AMD has already posted the list of approved coolers for Athlon MP, and as you can see the list closely matches that of Thunderbird. We used Taisol's 1.2GHz-approved heatsink with no problems in addition to Foxconn's more powerful 1.4GHz-approved cooler.