Athlon compatibility on new motherboards...

[gyoung]

Will the newest Socket A motherboards on the market support a 1.2Ghz Thunderbird era Athlon?

I'm looking to make the jump but want to do so a little slower than normal. I currently have a Abit KT7 with the above processor. I would like to reuse as much as possible and then be able to start upgrading.

Since the upgrade will require me to buy new RAM (the KT7 uses PC133 RAM) that and the motherboard will require the largest investment. I was thinking that the NForce2 is the preferred chipset.

I was looking at the following brands (in no particular order)[list=1][*]Abit[*]Asus[*]Biostar[*]Gigabyte[*]MSI[*]Epox[/list=1]

[Peter M]

Depends. Is that a "B" model for 100 MHz bus, or a "C" for 133? You might be out of luck with the former, since a few recent boards dropped 100 MHz bus support. Furthermore, the T-Bird lacks an internal thermal diode for the temperature monitoring - and some recent boards do not have an in-socket extra diode anymore for a temperature guesstimate, so maybe you won't see a CPU temperature.
But otherwise, you're fine with the old thing. I currently have a T-Bird 1000C on an ECS L7S7A2 board. This one has both caveats I mentioned above, but the 100 MHz support came back with the latest BIOS update. So it now even runs the original Duron-600

[gyoung]

I believe it is a "B" variety. It is running on a Abit KT7-RAID motherboard which is a 100Mhz board.

[Peter M]

I see. You need to check for 100 MHz CPU bus support then. Often referred to as "FSB200".