AMD's new high performance processor has now been released some 9 days ago and supposedly Athlon-systems have started shipping since. It's still close to impossible to get a single Athlon-CPU in any shop though, but this might hopefully change soon. It doesn't matter if you acquire a complete Athlon-system or you build one up yourself, the shiny new Athlon-processor requires a special motherboard. The 'Fester'-motherboards that AMD shipped with the Athlon review-systems will not be used in any commercial system, so that you as an end-user, OEM or system integrator will have to look for an Athlon-platform from one of the various motherboard makers.

There's Only Few Athlon Motherboards ...

Getting a motherboard may sound simple, but unfortunately the story is pretty far from simple in case of AMD's new Athlon. This review includes only four motherboards for the time being, and one of them is AMD's Fester-board, which was tested out of competition. You may think that Tom's Hardware Guide did a bad job in acquiring boards, but this is certainly not the case. As a matter of fact, there's only a minority of motherboard manufacturers that are actually offering Athlon-platforms right now, the minority is either quiet, or even announcing that they will not produce Athlon-motherboards for rather cheesy reasons.