In this paper we study and compare the performance of FPGA-based implementations of the five final AES candidates (MARS, RC6, Rijndael, Serpent, and Twofish). Our goal is to evaluate the suitability of the aforementioned algorithms for FPGA-based implementations. Among the various time-space implementation tradeoffs, we focused primarily on time performance. The time performance metrics are throughput and key-setup latency. Throughput corresponds to the amount of data processed per time unit while the key-setup latency time is the minimum time required to commence encryption after providing the input key. Time performance and area requirement results are pro- vided for all the final AES candidates. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any published results that include key-setup latency results. Our results suggest that Rijndael and Serpent favor FPGA implementations the most since their algorithmic characteristics match extremely well with the hardware characteristics of FPGAs.