In the world of AMD processors, you only have 2 choices, and there are very few motherboards that actually use them. You have the AMD 750 "Irongate" chipset, which was released along with the original Athlon last August. This chipset doesn't pack any of the fancy features that many of the new chipsets sport, but work just fine. It has a 100MHz Double Data Rate bus, which basically equals 200MHz. See, the way this works is that the bus can transfer data on both the rising and falling of the clock, whereas the traditional buses can only do this on the falling of the clock. This effectively doubles the data transfer. The 750 only has support for AGP 2X and uses PC100 SDRAM (the DDR bus is only used for the communication between the CPU and the chipset, everything else uses a 100MHz bus). Overall, a nice and simple chipset. If you get a board with this chipset, make sure to get one with a Socket A interface and not a Slot A, as the latter is for the older, original Athlons. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any boards sport a Socket A + AMD 750 combo, hence, we have VIA to the rescue!

VIA had a very nice chipset for the original Athlon called the KX133. It sported AGP 4X and was able to run the memory at 133MHz (using PC133 memory, of course), the CPU at 100MHz DDR (or 200MHz) and everything else at 100MHz. This added boost of speed in the memory department makes the KX133 perform better than the AMD750. With the release of the new Socket A Athlons, VIA had a problem. The KX133 chipset was never designed for the Socket A, so it couldn't be made into a KX133 + Socket A combo (unlike the AMD750, which, ironically, does support the Socket A). Out came VIA's solution, the KT133. The KT133 is essentially identical to the KX133 with one difference: support for the Socket A. I've actually seen a few boards with the KT133 + Socket A combo, so I guess that is the only viable choice for you Athlon goers.

On to: Other Motherboard Considerations