IWill BD133 i815EP Motherboard
May 22nd, 2001 | By Archive
IWill BD133 i815EP Motherboard
Date
: 05/22/01 – 03:04:58 AM
Author
:
Category
: Motherboard
Manufacturer: IWill
Price: ???
Thanks to IWill for supplying us with the IWill BD133 motherboard!
Introduction
We all have to agree that the Socket A platform has become the most important and popular desktop platform around. Only a year ago, these honors belonged to an Intel platform such as the Socket 370 or Slot 1. This evolution was inevitable and is pretty easy to understand … You might ask why? Well, because the Socket A (AMD CPU based) platforms are faster and cheaper than the Intel competition. And isn’t a fast and cheap solution just what we want?! …
But because Intel is a long way from being ‘dead’, IWill has decided to bring us all a new Socket 370 motherboard based on the i815EP chipset, the
IWill BD133
. The pre-production sample we received still has some minor bugs in the BIOS, but that doesn’t prevent us from showing you what this board is capable of doing in terms of features, performance, stability and last but certainly not least overclocking … muhaha!
Let’s first see what specs the IWill BD133 has to offer us …
Specifications
Here’s the entire IWill BD133 spec list. We made a scan of the press sheet because there’s no official spec list on the IWill website. As soon as we receive the list by email (could be any minute or so), we will update this huge image with the text version of the list :
Sorry for the bad image quality … click the image for a more detailed but even bigger image!
Now let’s have a closer look at these specs …
The Specs In Detail – Impressions
What I already said to you earlier in this review, is that this IWill board is based on the i815EP chipset from Intel offering support for the latest support Intel PII/PIII Coppermine and Celeron processors. For the ones who don’t know what the difference is between the i815E and i815EP chipset, I will give a brief explanation. The i815EP is a revision of the i815E chipset without the onboard video. So, basicaly the EP is the E with video onboard. Now, that’s actually pretty easy if you put it this way ;) The lack of onboard video support makes this chipset a little bit cheaper compared to the ‘older’ i815E chipset and makes it even more interesting for value motherboards like this IWill BD133!
The i815EP chipset and the BD133 ‘only’ support up to 512MB of PC100/PC133 SDRAM in 3 DIMM sockets on the right of the CPU socket and the i815EP northbridge.
The Intel I/O Controller Hub 2 (ICH2) features UltraDMA/100 support, which allows burst mode data transfer rates of up to 100MB/sec, supports a maximum of 4 IDE devices and two USB controllers for a total of 4 USB ports … Yep, that’s right folks, you can attach up to 4 USB devices to this mobo, 2 on the backpanel and another 2 by connecting an expansion USB card to the mobo. This expansion card isn’t included in the package however.
We don’t see an onboard RAID controller attached to this board, but that’s pretty easy to unstand, because IWill wants this board to be as cheap as possible and most low end board customers wouldn’t use the onboard RAID anyway.
Like most motherboards that are being born these days, this one also has 1 AGP slot, 6 PCIs and a CNR slot (NO ISA). IWill has decided to equip this board with a CNR slot to lower the cost of communication features … but I wonder if anyone actually uses this Communication & Networking Riser?
Another cool feature on this motherboard is the IWill Voice Alert Technology … If the mobo detects an error (like a floppy drive cable that is not installed properly), the mainboard will tell what’s wrong through the PC speaker. I’d like to note that this can be pretty scary! Just imagine that your mainboard starts talking to you in the middle of the night :)
I was really amazed by the good looking and really solid plastic packaging of this IWill board. Yeah, this box looks like it’s coming directly from the latest Star Trek movie and is certainly not a plain and simple box like you get from other manufacturers. Take a look at the pictures and don’t dare to say you dislike that! The package contains a good user manual as well as a 80 pin UDMA100 IDE cable, a FDD cable, a bonus CD with Acrobat Reader, a sound utility and anti-virus software and last but not the least, the IWill Power Installer driver CD. Power Installer … what does that mean? Well, this is a cool feature you only get from IWill. You just install your operating system, put the Power Installer CD into your CDROM drive and watch the Power Installer install all the necessary drivers onto your hard disk drive. Is this easy or what?!
We certainly got to tell you something about the onboard sound on this board. It uses the C-Media CMI8738 sound chip to support 4.1 channel speakers. That’s right, guys, you’ll get 4.1 surround sound when you connect this one to your surround speakers! Now, that’s something you least expect from a value board like this BD133 … Furthermore the onboard C-Media sound chip also supports Directsound, Aureal A3D and more important EAX sound effects allowing a more realistic gaming experience! And what about the sound quality? Well, unlike most onboard sound solutions, this one produces an extremely good sound quality. I’ve seen many onboard sound solutions on many, many boards so far and this must be the first one I actually still use after testing it!
The system BIOS also deserves some discussion here. The BIOS comes with some interesting features, certainly if you want to do some tweaking and overclocking. The Bye-Bye Jumper & MicroStepping IWill Smart Settings allow you to adjust the CPU multiplier (2x – 12x), CPU FSB speed (66MHz – 200MHz in 1MHz increments (!!)), memory speed (100MHz or 133MHz) and CPU core voltage (1.60v – 2.05v). The only drawback here is that we cannot change the VIO voltage (3.4v – 3.6v – 3.75v) in the BIOS, we will have to do this by changed a jumpersetting on the motherboard :(
One remark about the board layout is that the floppy disk drive connector is situated just below the PCI slots. That makes it very difficult to attach the floppy cable to the board, especially when there’s a card in the 6th PCI slot …
Overclocking That Mofo
Because we want to see what IWill’s BD133 and the Intel i815EP have to offer, we are going to stress it as much as possible. I decided to use my P3-700E CPU that has been tested stable up to 1GHz … Just like we do in all our testing, we use high performance SDRAM like the OCZ Performance Max SDRAM (tested stable up to 175MHz CAS3!) to make sure the SDRAM doesn’t act like the bottleneck in our BD133 setup. The memory setting in the BIOS were maxed out during all the test and overclocking (CAS settings : 2-2-2-5)
Please note that Intel CPUs like the P3-700E we used in our test setup have a locked multiplier (7x on this CPU) … and sadly enough we cannot perform the pencil trick on these ones like we can the AMD CPUs! GRRRRR… >:( We’re are using the AVGS CA1000 cooler with copper bottom to cool the CPU down. Now that we’re talking about coolers, let me tell you that there should be enough space next to the CPU socket to mount all popular Socket 370 … although I must say it was pretty close sometimes.
I didn’t bother trying to run the P3-700E @ stock speed. I immediately crancked the FSB speed up to 133MHz and guess what … the system was perfectly stable @ 933MHz (7x133MHz) with a default core voltage (1.65v). As a true overclocker, I definately wanted to reach the 1GHz barrier on this IWill board … no matter what! I figured that this should be no problem because I already pushed it further than 1GHz during my Asus CUSL2 review. 1GHz, here I come!
Using a FSB speed of 143MHz and a 1.85v core voltage, I was able to run the P3 CPU rockstable @ 1GHz. I decided to set the memory voltage from 3.4v to 3.75v (maximum VIO voltage setting on this mainboard) … just to be on the safe side!
The next step would be to find out how high we can push the CPU above the 1GHz speedmark! After doing some experimenting with the CPU core voltage and FSB speed, I found out that the CPU and the IWill BD133 were perfectly stable @ 1022MHz or 1.02GHz (1.95v). To be absolutely sure of this, I ran RC5 together with Prime95 for a whole day and guess what … stable as rock! Check out the screenshot (7x146MHz) :
Not a bad board so far, now let’s head on to the benchmarks!
Benchmarking
System setup
- AOpen HQ45 case
- IWill BD133 motherboard
- Intel P3-700E
- AVGS CA1000 Cooler
- 128MB OCZ Performance Max SDRAM
- Quantum UDMA100 13GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Creative Annihilator PRO (GeForce 256 DDR)
- Win ME
- DirectX 8a + Detonator 6.50
Now that you know our system specs, let’s see some results …
Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro
CPU Benchmark
Performance is great … Don’t you agree?
Multimedia Benchmark
Some story here …
Memory Benchmark
Wooow guys, look at these memory scores. Again the IWill BD133 and the BIOS memory tweaks do a mighty fine job!
CPU Mark 99
FPU Mark 99
RC5 Short Benchmark
Well, it looks like this board was born for benchmarking :) Nice scores on all benchmarks …
Good
- i815EP chipset
- Will not be that expensive
- Easy Overclocking & Tweaking Options
- Stable
- Performance
- ‘Value’ is a little misplaced
- Great onboard sound
Bad
- No onboard RAID
- Doesn’t come with an expansion USB card
- Floppy Drive connector below the PCI slots
- Minor bugs in the BIOS
Conclusion
After doing some serious torturing on this BD133 like running Prime95, RC5 and some 3DMark2k demo loops for a long period of time, I believe we can conclude that this i815EP based mobo is a winner from IWill in terms of overall performance, stability, overclocking and memory tweaks. I even dare to say that the BD133 is THE best Socket370 board I have ever layed my hands on. No seriously, this board is a great Socket370! Check it out yourselves when it is avaivable at your local retailer …