The Good die young-slot A is dead but still popular
Mar 10 '01 (Updated May 25 '01)
The Bottom Line Slot A cpus are no longer being made. Soon only used cpus will be available for upgrades. Good budget system.
The first thing you should know about Slot A is that it is exclusive to AMD processors. The second thing you should know is, to my knowledge, AMD has stopped "officially" producing the slot A processor. AMD apparently has a few contracts with several computer companies that have slot A motherboards in their production runs and for those companies a very limited run of Slot A Thunderbirds (t-bird) was produced. If you search diligently you can still find Classic athlon and Slot A thunderbirds for sale on the internet but they are extremely difficult to find anymore and usually can only be found in the lower speed ranges at bargain prices.
If you are looking to build a budget system then this may very well be the way to go as prices on the cpus and motherboards fall because they can't compete with socket A boards and cpus. The down side is that once existing stocks of slot A cpus are gone there will never be any more and you will not have an upgrade path to a faster processor unless you happen to find one used. If money isn't a consideration and you are trying to decide between slot A and socket A, go with the socket A. If you want a budget system that is pretty easy to overclock, depending upon the motherboard and other considerations, then a slot A system may be for you.
Further comment on overclocking: There are many "golden finger" devices available for overclocking the slot A cpu. These work well but they require you to do some minor surgery to the case of your cpu in order to install them, I personally do not care to cut the case of my cpu with a hacksaw!!!! (Not to mention voiding your warranty the minute you do so.) Abit makes the KA7-100 motherboard that has softmenu III overclocking utilities built into the bios. I've had this board for about 2 months and I've tried the softmenu III utilities and they work very well. Currently I've got my 850 cpu oc'd to 950 mhz and so far all seems stable except for the occasional freeze which I believe is a combination of my soundblaster sound card and ATI radeon video card. To overclock you need good quality memory, a highquality Globalwin cpu fan and a highpowered power supply in the system which are necessary when overclocking.
When choosing your motherboard be sure to research what type of support is available from the manufacturer site. Epox, Soyo, MTI, and other big mainboard manufacturers often offer newsgroups and fairly regularly updated bios files for use in updating your computer and obtaining technical support. Go to the site and see what people are talking about on the newsgroup before you buy your board. That's also a good place to look to see if anyone is having problems with the hardware you are planning to put in your new board.
You may also run across references to Slot A thunderbird or "t-bird" AMD processors. Apparently there was a very limited run of slot A t-birds and they are different enough from a classic athlon processor that they may not work in a standard slot A motherboard that has not been specifically designed for the t-bird. From what I understand it's pretty much a spin of the roulette wheel, sometimes a t-bird will work and often it won't, it depends upon where the chip was produced and where the chipset in your motherboard was made. T-birds under 800 mhz have a better chance of working in kx133 based motherboards (and most of the slot a boards made have this chipset).
None of the manufacturers I've seen will make any claims that a slot A t-bird will work in their boards. AMD claims that their 750 chipset will support the t-bird with the latest bios updates. The Gigabyte GA-7IXE, ASUS K7M-RM and the DFI AK70 are all AMD 750 chipset motherboards. If you are considering a t-bird processor, go to the newsgroups that are often available at the home page for your motherboard manufacturer and ask if anyone is using a t-bird with success and what settings they had to implement to make it work. Often if it is possible to make a t-bird work in the board you have chosen, you will need to make special settings in the system bios that are often not set by default.
If you are building a Slot A system and want to use a GeForce video card in it (especially the original GeForce cards which are much more power hungry than the GeForce 2 chips) you will want to be sure that you have an excellent power supply in your system. Most cheap ATX cases do not come with a good power supply. A server class power supply in the 400W range and capable of supplying high continuously available amperages on the 3.3V branch usually costs around $70.00 (US dollars).
Choosing a case: The first thing to keep in mind is that most cheap cases will not hold a Slot A Athlon system because of the location of the memory chips and/or the cpu (both of which stick up vertically off the motherboard several inches). I've never seen a short/mini tower case that would hold an athlon, you will probably be limited to a mid or full tower case (the ventilation is better anyhow and you can often add additional fans to the case). Space inside the case is a big consideration because not only does the Slot A Athlon stick up off the board, it also has an enormous single/dual fan that sticks out several inches to the side of it.
I personally favor a case that has a sliding motherboard tray that can be unlocked and pulled out of the rear of the case while everything is installed on it. This type of case often costs $80.00 or more, mine was $99.00 but it also came with a decent power supply. If you work on your system a great deal, you will thank yourself endlessly if you spend the extra money on the sliding motherboard tray style case. This style of case also makes your life easier when you are installing memory, changing cables, or pulling devices in and out of the drive bays at the front of the case.
Power Supply: The classic Athlon and the original GeForce pull very hard on the 3.3V branch of your power supply so be sure that you have a good power supply in your system. Overall power supply wattage (most cases come with 250W or 300W) is not as important as the constant amperage that the supply can put out on the 3.3V branch going to the motherboard. Most power supplies have a chart on the side that gives marginal and maximum amperage on each branch, if's not at least 20-25A on the 3.3V branch then you may experience unexplained freeze-ups with your system.
ZippyUSA http://www.zippy.com.tw/2_power/all.htm offers power supplies that fit the bill and they post the characteristics of their supplies on their web page (where many other companies don't do so). This company will also sell you one unit direct over the internet so you don't have to to go through one of their suppliers. The minute I put in my Zippy product many of the unexplained freezes I was having with my old 250W supply just disappeared.
Last but not least are memory considerations. The classic athlon wants at least 128 meg of ram to run properly. Just like hard drive space, you can never have too much memory. Most slot A motherboards have 3 memory slots, a few have 4 memory slots. Depending upon the chipset in your motherboard, you may find that your board is picky about memory. Also check your documentation to see how much ram is supported by your chipset, most support something above 700K of ram. Just because you've got four slots don't think you can stack 256K chips in each slot. If you exceed the cacheable memory of your motherboard, then anything you have in there above what it can cache is doing you no good at all.
What brands to buy: I've always had excellent luck with Samsung or Micron memory chips, Viking, Crucial, and Mushkin memory products are also supposed to be excellent. You may want to limit yourself to 128 Meg memory sticks. 256 Meg sticks were relatively new when the classic athlon (and the chipsets) came out and you may find that you will have strange problems with 256 Meg sticks that disappear when you switch to 128 Meg sticks. Again, this is something you may want to research with the motherboard newsgroups before you decide on which brand of memory to buy and in what configuration. Above all, do not try to put generic memory in an athlon system, I guarantee you'll have more problems than the few dollars you saved is worth.
Chipsets: To my knowledge there are only 2 different chipsets available on a slot A motherboard. AMD made one of them, the AMD750, and VIA made the second the KX133. The AMD set doesn't support AGP4x or pc133 memory and there are other differences, you should research this before deciding on your motherboard.
In short, the Slot A motherboard is fine if you want a powerful machine on a budget, unfortunately you won't have much of an upgrade path because the cpus are no longer being produced. There have been reports of a German company attempting to design and produce a "slocket" card that would allow a socket A thunderbird to be used in a slot A motherboard but AMD currently claims that such a gadget would be an engineering impossibility, we'll see won't we.
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suemccartin
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Location: Florida, USA
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Been building computers for 10+ years. I work to support my computer habit.
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