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To: fyodor_ who wrote (21743)	12/6/2000 7:27:12 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

Another Iwill DDR motherboard mini-review at MaximumPC.com website. What's important is that this time the reviewers use a bona-fide 1.2 GHz 133 FSB TBird and compare it against the 760 reference board and a P4 1.5. The Iwill is slightly faster than the 760 and 15% faster than P4. So, we can add Photoshop to the list of applications that P4 sucks at:) but the board won't be available until "week after Christmas." :( Iwill Gets DDR Motherboard ~Maximum PC The first board out of the gate with a fully functional DDR chipset is Iwill's KA266-R. The heart of this board is ALi's MAGiK 1 chipset. MAGiK 1 is the AMD Duron and Thunderbird version while the Pentium III and Celeron version is dubbed Aladdin Pro 5. The MAGiK 1 chipset is based on M1647 Northbridge and M1535D+ Southbridge chips. These chips incorporate funky-fresh features such as support for DDR memory at PC1600 and PC2100 and support for SDR memory at PC66/100/133. This ensures there'll be boards supporting both SDR and DDR DRAM on the same motherboard. Throw in ATA/100 support and AGP 4X and you've got a chipset that's ready to take on VIA's and Intel's best. With that in mind, we grabbed the nearest GeForce2 Ultra card and popped in 256MB of DDR memory and ran some tests. We tested an early rev of the Iwill KA266-R (rev B, to be exact). Iwill admits to issues with this rev, suc as incompatibilities with ATI's Radeon videocard. To give Iwill credit here, rev A actually worked with the Radeon, but when the newer silicon was spun, issues arose. Iwill plans to have these issues in check when they ship final product the week after Christmas 2000. The KA266-R comes equipped with one AMR, one AGP and five PCI slots. Also, Iwill welded an AMI RAID controller to the board. We're talkin' some swank features here. Our testing showed that dominance went back and forth in a contest between the KA266-R and an AMD-760 reference system we tested for our January 2001 issue. The AMD-760 is also a DDR-chipset board. What's obvious from our testing is the undeniable fact that ALi has been busy creating a solid chipset with respectable drivers. All in all, the Iwill KA266-R is a bright spot in the efforts to eliminate RDRAM from the industry's future memory architecture plans. We offer a full review in our February 2001 issue, so be sure to check out all the glorious details about the first DDR motherboard to hit the store shelves. A benchmark to whet appetites: Photoshop 5.5, Maximum PC's action script (best score indicated with an asterisk): Pentium 4 (1.5GHz), 117 secs. AMD-760, 104 secs. * Iwill KA266-R, 102 secs. Notes: All systems used 7200 rpm IBM Deskstar, Windows 98 SE and GeForce 2 Ultra with 6.31 Detonator drivers. The Pentium 4 system was based on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 with 400MHz FSB, i850 chipset, 256MB of PC800 RDRAM and DX7B; each Thunderbird system was based on an AMD 1.2GHz Thunderbird with 266MHz FSB, 256MB of PC2100 DDR SDRAM and DX7 plus AMD DLL. The KA266-R used ALi's 1.72 AGP drivers. maximumpc.com Petz