The early Athlon motherboard hardware had a pre production feel to it. Little refinement, bugs, high sensitivity to power supply output, AGP instability, etc. There are a few boards with huge areas of unused, unnecessary PCB (very sloppy work). AMD 750 was AMD's contribution there because that chipset has broken AGP 2x. The CPUs themselves were perfectly fine AFAIK.

Other than that, the machine ran pretty stable. I was using a Voodoo 3 at the time, so I didn't have many AGP 2x issues with the SD11's Irongate Northbridge.

I actually had a grey duron T shirt, at the time my duron 600@952 was a very good gaming beast, I bought the v4 4500 as soon as it came out for it. My comp was one of the best at the LAN parties we used to have. Ah, those were the days.

The Voodoo3 saved you. I have an ASUS K7M that I've experimented with a bit and cards other than 3dfx tend to not work reliably. The AMD AGP driver disables AGP 2x (because it literally is non functional in the nortbridge). But even with cards running AGP 1x, with Radeon and GeForce cards I see occasional image corruption and lock ups. It's like a Super 7 board.

"Even if one chooses to go with an Athlon solution over the P3/Coppermine,
the only chipset readily available now, the AMD Irongate chipset cannot
handle AGP properly. This causes cards to resort to AGP 1x "command mode"
which somewhat slows down the card. Realize that AGP 1x "command mode" is
NOT AGP 1x, textures and other data is still retrieved at AGP 2x speed.
However, even AGP 1x "command mode" still has a problem, and that problem
becomes evident when we look at what's wrong with the Irongate chipset.

Essentially, the Irongate chipset has a bug in it which corrupts data/etc.
sent through the AGP bus. In the case of things such as texture data, the
number of corrupt bytes is very small; in actual gameplay, one or two pixels
which are not what they are supposed to be will never be noticed. However,
if a graphic command is passed through wrong, the effects can cause even a
system crash. For this reason, BIOS fixes for Irongate chipsets play it safe
and resort to AGP 1x when sending commands. It is interesting to note that
once applications begin to make extensive use of T&L, the sparse data errors
can cause hugely noticeable effects, for example, entire polygons may be
severely skewed or completely missing if simply one bit is flipped.
Hopefully VIA's recently released Athlon chipset will bring about good
things for Athlon."

There are a few boards with huge areas of unused, unnecessary PCB (very sloppy work).

AFAIR the 750 has some higher noise levels on the AGP port that could lead to the wrong data transmitted at AGP 2x. Still noise is a somewhat analog problem and is highly dependent on the mainboard layout, graphics card used, probably even the used power supply. Still the hardware manufacturers play safe and fall back to AGP 1x if an irongate is detected. This does btw. also the NVidia driver.
Still I strongly recommend everyone with such a setup to test if his setup is prone to the data corruption and thus lockups. Usually running 3DMark2001 in a loop for several hours will reveal instabilities.

Inexplicably, the ECS K7S5A and SiS 735 have a fanboy crowd. Watch out.

Here's the other FIC board with wasted space. The AZ11. It looks like you could make your own micro ATX board with a bit of sawing.