IWill KD266 Motherboard
Jun 15th, 2001 | By Archive
IWill KD266 Motherboard
Date
: 06/15/01 – 03:11:30 AM
Author
:
Category
: Motherboard
Page 1 : Introduction
Manufacturer: IWill
Price: unknown, will be rather cheap according to IWill
Thanks to IWill for supplying us with their KD266 motherboard!
Introduction
A few days ago, we had a very interesting review of IWill’s semi-pro server solution, the DVD266-R. If you have read the review, you should know that the DVD266-R is based upon the VIA Pro266 chipset which adds DDR memory support to this dual Socket 370 mainboard. So why do I mention this information in this review? Well, just because I want to prove to you that nearly every motherboard that gets reviewed on the web these days is VIA chipset based. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing! Not at all actually! I’m just saying that you shouldn’t think that VIA is the only (good) chipset manufacturer around these days. We also have AMD with their AMD760 DDR Socket A chipset and their AMD760MP dual Socket A chipset. Sis have theirselves the new Sis 735 DDR Socket A chipset and ALi has the ALiMAGiK 1 DDR Socket A chipset. And let’s not forget nVidia’s nForce chipset sporting an onboard GeForce2 MX. So, you see that’s VIA is certainly not the only contender on the chipset market.
Today, Overclockers Online is going to take a very close look at the IWill KD266 mainboard. This is the latest Socket A board from IWill and guess what, it’s not a KT133A based board! No sir, it’s powered by the ALi M1649 northbridge and the ALi 1535D+ southbridge supporting a 133MHz FSB and 3GB of system memory. Yes, that’s right, this is a fully ALi based mainboard, but more about this later in the review.
I’ve seen some hardware websites test this board against some of the top KT133A mainboard performers, but I believe that’s not the way to do it. Why not? Well, because IWill doesn’t sell this board as a high performance Socket A board but merely as a value Socket A board with (and I quote) ‘exceptional’ performance! That’s why we decided to compare our KD266 testresults against these of the KT7E value board from Abit (KT133E chipset). Do you remember that the KT7E gave us benchmarks looking similar to these of the KT7A (KT133A chipset)?
More about the testresults when we reach the test part of this review. Now let’s continue with the specifications …
Page 2 : Specifications
Specifications
Here’s the KD266′s entire spec list (copy / paste from the IWill website) :
Processor
Supports Socket A for AMD Athlon and Duron processors
Supports AMD Athlon processors from 700 MHz to 1.2 GHz and higher
Supports AMD Duron processors from 600 MHz to 800 MHz and higher
Supports adjustable Vocre function
Supports 266/200 MHz front side bus
Chipset
AliM1649,BGA528 chipset
Ali1535D+,BGA352 chipset
Bus Frequency
Supports DDR266/200 MHz FSB
MicroStepping Iwill CPU Frequency Setting
Bye-Bye Jumper IWILL Smart Setting (Software CPU Frequency Setting)
System Memory
Supports PC133/100SDRAM
3×168-pin 3.3v unbuffered DIMM sockets
Maximum memory capacity up to 3GB
On Board IDE
Dual ATA/100 IDE Channels
Supports ATAPI IDE CD-ROM, ZIP-100 & LS-120
Support PIO Mode up to Mode 4
Expansion Slots
1 x AGP Slot supports AGP 4X/2X
6 x PCI 2.2 Bus Master Slots
2 x Ultra ATA/100 connectors
Power Management
Supports voltage monitoring
Supports fan ON/OFF control signal
Supports temperature sensor
Suppports power on by LAN/Ext, Int Modem/PS2 Keyboard, Mouse/RTC/PME
Supports resume by LAN/Ext, Int Modem/PS2 Keyboard, Mouse/RTC/PME
Supports BIOS ROM Flash Control
Supports manually assign PC IRQ
I/O Interface
1 x SMBus Header
1 x FDD
1 x Parallel port
1 x PS/2 connector for Mouse(Supports Auto Swapping)
1 x PS/2 connector for Keyboard(Supports Auto Swapping)
1 x Internal IR connector
2 x Serial ports
2 x USB ports
BIOS
2 Mb EEPROM with Flash Protection
‘Bye-Bye Jumper’ Iwill Smart Setting
PC99 Compliant
Supports Plug and Play (PnP)
Supports ACPI 1.0
Supports APM 1.2
Supports DMI 2.1
Board Size
ATX Form Factor – 305mm x 193mm
Special Utilities
Acrobat Reader
Auto Run Iwill Power Installer CD
Hardware Monitoring Utility
Trend-Micro full-function PC-Cillin Anti-Virus program
Package Contents
1 x Iwill KD266 Motherboard
1 x User Manual
1 x Iwill Power Installer CD
1 x ATA/100 IDE cable
1 x Floppy cable
There you go … if you read the spec list and you haven’t fallen asleep yet, we can continue with discussing these specs in detail. This will give you a good idea of what the KD266 has to offer.
The Specs In Detail
The heart of this IWill KD266 mobo is the ALi M1649 northbridge. This chip allows the KD266 to support 200MHz (100MHz DDR) FSB speeds for the AMD Duron CPUs and the Athlon B CPUs as well as a 266MHz (133MHz DDR) FSB for the Athlon C CPUs. The weird thing is that I can’t find anything on the ALi website about this ALi M1649 chip. My guess is that this M1649 is nothing more and nothing less than a slightly modified ALi MAGiK chipset. Even WCPUID thinks the M1649 chipset is the ALi MAGiK DDR chipset … look at the chipset ID! I guess ALi has taken the MAGiK DDR chipset, removed the DDR support and renamed it to the M1649 … I could be wrong of course, but that’s the most logical explanation. Do you have a better one? Let me know ;)
The ALi M 1535D+ southbridge supports up to 4 UDMA66/100 drives at the same time. Nothing special to mention here. The KD266 does NOT come with an onboard RAID controller which is quite understandable because IWill wanted to keep the cost as low as possible. That’s probably the main reason why they didn’t include an onboard soundchip on this board.
I have some great news for all you memory freaks out there. You can put up to 3GB (!!) of PC100/PC133 SDRAM in 3 DIMM socket on this board. That’s twice as much memory as on the VIA KT133A based boards! On the other hand we have to ask ourselves why we should use 3GB of system memory on a value board. But heck … it supports the damn 3GB of SDRAM in case you need it!
The KD266 features an AGP 4x slot to put in your favorite video card and 6 PCI slots. Yes that’s right, 6 PCI slots instead 5 PCIs and 1 ISA or 1 CNR. I love it!
This ALi based board does have quite some overclocking and tweaking potential. Almost every tweak everything can be set in the BIOS except for the I/O voltage. This has to be set by a jumper on the top right of the board and the standard 3.3v can be increased by 5% or 10%. Of course we immediately set it to a 10% increase to insure board stability during our overclocking adventure. As I said before, the CPU core voltage is adjustable up to 1.85v in the BIOS.
There isa new feature onboard that we’ve never seen before and it’s called a
Low Pass Filter
! What’s the general idea behind this Low Pass Filter? Well it is pretty simple … This technology has been designed with future +1.5GHz AMD CPUs in mind. IWill uses this Low Pass Filter to avoid signal errors and remove any noise (signal distortion) that could occur on these high frequenty platforms. IWill states that the benefits of this so called Low Pass Filter Technology will become more evident when CPU speeds will increase in the near future. Could be interesting, no?
Page 3 : In The Box
In The Box
Now let’s see what we can expect to find in the box once we open it up :
- Iwill KD266 Motherboard
- Motherboard User Manual
- Iwill’s Power Installer CD
- 1 x UDMA100 IDE cable
- Floppy cable
Just like all the IWill boards we reviewed so far, all this KD266 stuff is also packed in a solid white plastic housing. This doesn’t only look good, but it also protects the motherboard against a clumsy YOU ;)
The user manual could be much better though. I’m not saying that it isn’t well-written or that you’re not going to find any answers in it but it looks so tiny. When you put it next to an Asus, AOpen, Abit or EPoX manual, you can clearly notice a quality difference. BUT hey, do we buy a mainboard for its manual? I believe not!
The Power Installer CD still rules bigtime, just like on the IWill boards we reviewed earlier. You just put the CD in your CDROM drive and the Power Installer will install the necessary drivers onto your hard drive! Talking about easy … well, this is fast and easy!
Too bad IWill only supplies one UDMA100 IDE cable in this package :( If you have a hard drive running on the primary IDE controller and you want your CDROM drive and/or CDwriter to run on the second IDE controller, you will have to get in your car, go to the nearest hardware shop and buy yourself an extra IDE cable.
Page 4 : The Layout
The Layout
For the first time in my life, I got to admit I’m ‘almost’ 100% satisfied with the layout of a board. Of course, we all have our own personal opinion about this, but everyone will agree that the layout of the KD266 rocks. See for yourselves …
The ATX power connector on the board is situated at the top center of the board. This results in a better overall airflow inside your case because you can keep the ATX power cable very close to the power supply.
The DIMMs are on the right spot as well. They are on the right of the CPU socket and what’s more important, not too close too the socket and/or the AGP slot. You can easily add or remove memory even when you have a large AGP videocard.
The IDE connectors and the floppy drive connector can be found on the right edge of the board. And did you notice that the northbridge doesn’t have active cooling?
There’s pretty much enough space next to the CPU socket to mount a cooler on your highly overclocked CPU. I do had some small difficulties putting my Swiftech MC370 heatsink on my CPU because the ATX power connector is a little close to the socket. Nothing to worry about, because if you bend the plastic of the connector a little, it’ll fit!
The only free space you will find on the board is the one next to the serial ports … this space could easily be used to install onboard sound (but it isn’t, remember). Maybe future revisions of this board will have this feature?
The board is very very small as it measures only 305mm x 193mm. Nice work from the IWill engineers if you ask me.
Page 5 : The BIOS
The BIOS
The IWill KD266 has a highly tweakable Award 6.00PG BIOS. This BIOS looks very similar to what we are used to on our avarage KT133A board … IWill uses another terminology but the basic idea stays the same. Adjusting memory timings, changing multipliers, FSB speeds, CPU core voltage and so on.
Like I already mentioned earlier in this review, the only thing an overclocker will have to change by a jumper is the I/O voltage. It can be set to 3.3v + 5% or + 10%. The rest can be adjusted from within the BIOS! :)
We can adjust the CPU clock, the multiplier, PCI clock divider, CPU core voltage and the BIOS flash protection in the CPU tab of the BIOS. The FSB speed can be set from 100MHz up to 180MHz in 1MHz increments thanks to IWill’s MicroStepping technology. Kinda reminds me of Abit’s Softmenu III :) The CPU core voltage must be selected out of 16 settings from 1.125v – 1.85v in 0.025v increments. This is not different from other popular Socket A board on the market today.
Because this is an ALi based board, it’s pretty normal to discover ALi-only features and tweaks in the BIOS of the board. Names and terms we haven’t seen yet on other boards. But, basically all these overclocking options and tweaks are the same as the ones on your favorite KT133A/KT133E board. The most important memory tweak on this board are the DRAM timing settings. This is were you can select your CAS settings and most important the memory timings from failsafe (slowest) to Ultra2 (fastest).
You will have to experiment and find the optimal settings for your hardware …
Page 6 : Overclocking
Overclocking
Because we all want to know what the ALi M1649 chipset and this IWill KD266 is really worth, I decided to put my reliable Duron 850 in the CPU socket. Note that this CPU is capable of running 1.1GHz without any hickups! … To make sure the SDRAM doesn’t act as a bottleneck, I decided to use OCZ Performance Max SDRAM. This high performance SDRAM has been tested stable up to 175MHz CAS3. Now let’s see what we can squeeze out of this board …
A 133MHz FSB with the memory setting to fastest (CAS2, Ultra2) didn’t appear to give us any problems as the system ran stable @ 7.5x133MHz (1000MHz). Because the KD266 sure has the looks and the options to be a true overclockers board, I wanted to push it to its limits. That limit appears to be a 150MHz FSB with all the BIOS setting set to max (CAS 2, Ultra2). With a multiplier of 7x, I could run my Duron 850 @ 1050 / 1.8v (7x150MHz). With our SDRAM set to CAS3, I managed to cruise along just fine using a 155MHz FSB. Anything above that either didn’t POST or was unstable during our 3DMark2k1 loops.
Now that you know that the KD266 is a sweet overclocker, let’s check out some real benchmarking! Follow me and click to move on to the next page …
Page 7 : Benchmarking
Benchmarking
System setup
- No case
- IWill KD266 / Abit KT7E
- Swiftech MC370-0A cooler
- AMD Duron 850
- 128MB OCZ Performance Max SDRAM
- Western Digital UDMA100 20GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Innovision GeForce2 MX400
- Win2k + SP2
- DirectX 8a + Detonator 6.50
- Used VIA 4in1 4.31 on the KT7E mainboard
We are going to show you some Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro benches, a Quake 3 Arena timedemo and a 3DMark2001 benchmark to check out what the ALi AGP controller is capable of. First, I decided to run all benchmarks using a 133MHz FSB (Duron 850 @ 1GHz). This allows us to compare the results to the ABIT KT7E benchmark results. Of course, we also did some benchmarking at 150MHz … curious already?
Now let’s head on to the benchmark results :
Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro
CPU Benchmark
Nothing special to report here …
Multimedia Benchmark
… no real surprise here either!
Memory Benchmark
Well well well now, let’s see … the KD266 can’t quite keep up with our KT7E memory performance, does it?! The memory on the KD266 has to be clocked at 150MHz to outperform the KT7E’s memory running at 133MHz. Don’t forget that we can clock the KT7E up to 146MHz … this will completely blow away the KD266!
Drive Benchmark
Performance of this IBM 20GB UDMA100 is similar to that of a slower UDMA66 drive. Looks like the IDE controller has some explaining to do if you know what I mean! Or is it just a driver problem?
CPU Mark99
FPU Mark99
Quake 3 Arena v1.17 Timedemo 1
Because I’m using a GeForce2 MX400 in these 3D tests, the results at high resolutions are a bit low on both boards, however you will see the KT7E (running a 133MHz FSB) outperform a KD266 mainboard running a 150MHz FSB!
3DMark2001
Nothing to worry about here folks … pretty much the same story as on the previous Quake 3 benchmark! The KD266 gets punched in the face by the KT7E! The GeForce2 MX400 is also the damn bottleneck again! :(
Page 8 : Conclusion
Conclusion
Good
- IWill MicroStepping
- Great Layout
- Overclocking & Tweaking Options
- No Stability Issues
- 155MHz FSB
- Cheaper than a KT133A board
- 6 PCIs
- No onboard sound
Bad
- Low Memory Performance
- Low 3D Performance
- BIOS Tweaks Not Easy To Use
IWill is clearly aiming towards the low end and budget market with this KD266. Although it has features like the ALi M1649 chipset, 6 PCI slots and a lot of tweaks and overclocking options in the BIOS, this board should have performed better in my opinion. We’ve seen that the KT7E from Abit clocked at 1GHz using a 133MHz FSB almost performs on the par with the IWill KD266 using a 150MHz FSB! It’s definately a very cheap socket A mobo but I believe there are other cheap, better performing and more mature solutions available. Is it a good alternative to the KT133A mobos? Well, I would answer ‘NO’ to that question. On the other hand, if you would ask me ‘Is it a good socket A starters board?’ then the answers would be a definate YES!