I have spent quite a bit of time looking for good boards for Mobile Athlon XP processors, and haven't found any great answers, and as a result I have bought (and been disappointed with) several different boards so far, so I figured I would put up this post with a bit of info on the boards I have tried, in the interest of some more helpful search results, and hopefully to try and save some people from ordering a board they won't be happy with.
From a micro-ATX board to be used with a mobile athlon XP, the features that I would expect would be:
-able to run the processor at stock speed (preferably through BIOS, but pin-modding if needed)
-able to run the processor at stock core voltage (again, BIOS would be good, don't even think this is an option via pin-modding on any boards I've seen)
-able to go into S3 standby.
So far I haven't been able to find a board that can do all of those. If you know of one, I would appreciate if you would post it... or if you have tried any boards other than the ones I have listed that you were disappointed with, feel free to post those as well.
------------------The List------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Biostar M7NCG 400
-This is mostly a great board, NForce2 chipset, good onboard GeForce graphics, FSB, multiplier, and core voltage are adjustable in BIOS, so an XP-M can be run with the proper core voltage of around 1.35v, and at the correct speed without any hardware mods (ie - pin mod). I was also able to get some dynamic underclocking working in windows, ie - having software drop the FSB to about 66% of normal when the CPU load was low, to save power. Couldn't get it to drop the multiplier on-the-fly, unfortunately.
-The fatal flaw is that it does not support S3 standby (suspend-to-RAM) with the newer board revisions (ie - version 7.2 which is the common current version). their tech support has told me that the actual hardware required for it has been removed from the boards, so there is no way to restore the function by flashing an older BIOS, etc.
-I also have had significant issues getting the board to resume from hibernation. It has resumed OK a couple of times, but usually it just fails. This could very well be due to some other piece of my hardware, but the same hardware works with hibernation on other motherboards, and I've heard of others having hibernate resume issues on this board as well, so take from it what you will.
Biostar M7VIZ 400
-This board uses a VIA chipset so it doesn't have Vcore adjustment and requires pin-modding to run an XP-M processor at the right speed; the stock Vcore will be 1.5v which is quite a bit too high, making it run hot. As a result you may want to underclock the processor (either by pin-modding a lower multiplier, or by reducing the FSB) to keep it cooler, but that defeats the point of using a mobile processor to a degree.
-Versions 5.x of this mobo do support S3 standby; I had some instability with it but once again it could have been due to any other piece of the hardware I was using, or a crappy OS install, etc... but I did use it successfully for quite a while in a normal desktop machine so I know S3 can work fine.
PC CHIPS A31G
-This board is a socket 754 board, I bought it because newegg (at the time of writing) sells/sold it as a combo with a special Athlon XP-M processor that is kind of a hybrid of an athlon and a sempron... it has some of the features of the 64-bit lineup, most importantly to me, the cool'n'quiet feature. It ran very well, it was fast, quiet, etc... and I only paid a little over $100 for the mobo, processor, and CPU fan as a combo.
-Once again, I got a newer version of the board than was advertised for sale (ad was for v1.0, I received v1.1C) and the new revision no longer had S3 standby support. That really disappointed me because the board is so nice otherwise.
PC CHIPS M863G version 7.1C
-This is a socket A board which is bundled with an AMD Geode NX 1750 processor. That processor is basically a very low-power version of an athlon; it is rated at 14W, which is less than half as much power as even athlon XP-M's.
-Because of all my recent failures with motherboard purchases, I emailed the manufacturer to ask about this SPECIFIC mobo/cpu combo, and they assured me that it supported S3 standby. I bought one, received it, and it does NOT support S3. The mobo is the correct version (7.1C), cpu is correct, etc... The BIOS available for download on their site is noted as being the first release, so I don't think it would be any different than what's on the board already, though I haven't tried it.
-I have emailed the company, as I am pretty upset about being specifically told that this particular board supported S3 and finding that it does not, hopefully there is some sort of setting or BIOS update that they can give me... we'll see how that goes. I fail to see why a company would market a mobo/cpu combo as a very low-power solution, and then not include S3 standby which is an important power-saving feature, thus its popularity in laptops.
*edit* Yeah, that went real well. When I sent tech support the email asking about it after they had basically lied to me, they stopped responding. Another guy bought one and asked about it himself, they asked for a copy of the email in which they had told me it supported S3, so I provided it, and then I never heard another word from them.
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