One of the primary fallacies of logic is to make a hasty generalization to the masses from experience gained on a singular scale. Taking our early Athlon system's good stability and peripheral compatibility results, (which was provided from AMD themselves) and generalizing them to readers as if every single future Athlon system would perform the same way would be falling into that trap.

But now, two months have passed since the Athlon's introduction, and we're happy to report that the Athlon platform continues to impress both our own staff and the many system integrators who manufacture Athlon-based PCs in terms of stability and peripheral compatibility.

This feedback, from companies who have now purchased and sold thousands of Athlon systems, is a heck of a lot better control group to draw from than a single reviewer with a single Athlon PC when making sweeping recommendation statements to readers.

The Athlon is now a pretty good-looking recipe for a power-system in our minds, but the entrée is about to get even tastier.

Sharky Extreme has learned that out of the initial Athlon-supporting mainboards that are being manufactured by various overseas vendors for 1999, a minimum of two of them will support full control of the Athlon's clock speed and multiplier settings through their soft BIOS routines.

Popular mainboard manufacturer ASUS will be one of the two overclockable Athlon board vendors, while the second is an overseas company that operates on a much smaller scale. Both should be available by November.

This comes as great news for many readers as the thought of taking an Athlon 600 up to 650MHz, or today's Athlon 700 up to 750MHz is too good to resist.

Let's take a look at the new Athlon 700 CPU, and see if it manages to outpace its competitors enough at its stock speed to justify its premium price tag.