The Athlon Thunderbird is compatible with two chipsets, VIA's KT133 chipset and AMD's 750 chipset and soon the 760 chipset. Since the Thunderbird 1.2GHz is a performance CPU, we find it highly unlikely that you will see one matched to an AMD 750 chipset. Instead, almost every Athlon Thunderbird will be mated with a motherboard armed with VIA's KT133 chipset until more chipsets are released.

Overall, we are positive about the KT133 chipset, though we are not professing our love for it. On the one hand, it is by far the most stable chipset we have seen from VIA. We were pleasantly surprised by its stability and compatibility across a wide range of motherboards. On the other hand, we have run into small problems here and there with KT133 motherboards. Sometimes there are memory issues and other times there are Windows 2000 performance issues. In the end, we like VIA's KT133 chipset though we think there is still room for improvement.

The near term future of Athlon chipsets is looking very bright. AMD's 760 DDR chipset should hit in November or December. ALi's ALiMAGiK 1 DDR chipset should hit in mid-November. AMD's 760MP chipset should hit in early 2001, and VIA's DDR chipset should also hit in 2001. The DDR chipsets should give a large performance boost to applications that make heavy use of memory bandwidth. AMD will also be announcing 266MHz FSB (133MHz double-pumped to be exact) processors around the time these motherboards ship. We expect a sizeable boost in Quake III Arena frame rates when that happens.

For more info, check out our preview of Tyan's AMD 760 DDR chipset motherboard as well as Iwill's ALiMAGiK 1 DDR chipset motherboard.

We asked this in our 1.1GHz Athlon review and we'll ask it again. Is there anything new with the Athlon Thunderbird 1.2GHz? Well, other than an extra 100MHz, no. Nothing! Absolutely nothing! There is no excitement here folks. This is the nirvana of processor changes. Nothingness is the change, and the change is nothing. Get it? Good. OK, let's move on.