Boards with the faster 694X are not yet available from all motherboard companies, so 693A mainboards are quite spread as well. It's quite a long time since we did the last big motherboard review. This one was quite heavy, since benchmarking 21 boards takes a lot of time. Those boards should also be very cheap, since I expect the 693A chipset to vanish from the market - thanks to the faster and better brother. I think if you want to spend a lot of money for a fast CPU, you will certainly have some bucks left to get a decent motherboard.
Performance is an issue again .
That is something you should consider carefully. As long as most companies did not have time to optimize their boards and utilize some experience with the latest chipsets, power users should not buy a motherboard without having read performance comparisons. Maybe you won't need a USB Hub in case the board offers four USB ports. You could get a cheap Celeron now and upgrade to a Pentium III as soon as you can afford your model. Overclocking is a hot topic.