While their products do have a premium price, the stability and features of their boards are usually excellent. Now that overclocking is becoming a hobby for thousands of enthusiasts, Asus has more than adequately addressed that market with products such as the P5A, the P2B, and the latest P3B motherboard. Asus has applied their knowledge to the AMD 751 northbridge and has come out with undoubtedly the most interesting first generation Athlon motherboard. The K7M is truly the only overclockable Athlon board available until the VIA KX133 chipset hits the streets. The AMD 750 chipset is very hard to overclock due to the tight timings required for the EV-6 bus to operate properly.
Lets see how it fared.
The Asus K7M is a six layer Athlon board that sports the AMD 751 Northbridge combined with the VIA 686a Super Southbridge. The physical layout of the board is quite compact for what it has to offer. Unlike the massive FIC SD-11, this board is actually quite cramped and is almost starved for room. While many of us hail Asus for compacting the Athlon board and making it fit in a wider variety of cases, there are some definite tradeoffs that adversely affect the board. All three of these are close together with the ATX power supply connector sitting in between the CPU and DIMM slots.