3DVelocity would like to thank Iwill for their help and courtesy, in particular Kathryn at Freecom UK and Michael and Eileen at Iwill PR Taipei.

Part Two: The Retail Pack - 'What Do I Actually Get?'

The Picture below illustrates how the Iwill KK266plus - R will arrive.

Contents:

1 x Users Manual

1 x Raid Setup Manual

1 x Quick Start Guide Leaflet

1 x Iwill 'Power Installer' (Driver Compact Disk)

2 x ATA-100 IDE Cables

1x Floppy Drive Cable

1 x PCI Audio Card (To Enable the Six Channel Sound)

1 x Bag Of Extra Plastic 'Jumpers'

(and the main board of course.)

.....an impressive package indeed but the motherboard has been named 'plus' for a reason. The next section will find out why.

Part Three: 6 Channel 'C - Media' Hardware Sound Output, The plus!

Upgrading your computer is never easy on most standard incomes, so if you have have decided to stay with SDR motherboards, the Iwill KK266 + R can help to ease the blow. Iwill have decided to included a high quality 5.1 audio solution with the motherboard. Powered by C-media's onboard chip, the Board is able to deliver amazing sound thus eradicating the need to buy an expensive 5.1 soundcard. I know what you must be surmising as this point, I must admit to being a tad skeptical myself. Surely this wouldn't sound as good as my trusty SBlive! ? I was WRONG. The audio sounds amazing, it was far better than I had hoped. I used the Creative surround speakers and I must conclude the audio was clear, crisp and only distorted at the highest volume available. It was far louder and more charismatic than the creative solution. Overall I would suggest the Creative solution just holds a slight edge, but for general gaming and .mp3 usage the sound is great. On a side note, I may have to revise these statements further when new drivers become available. The board shipped with the first release drivers and I would expect the audio to get even better when the drivers mature.

Part Four: Testing

Test Setup: -

1Ghz Amd Athlon DDR Cpu, 256 Megs Crucial pc133 cas 2 memory, 64 Meg Retail Vivo Radeon card, 45 Gig IBM 75 gxp H/D, 300watt AMD approved PSU.

Test Benchmarks Formulated From:-

Sissoft Sandra, Mad Onion's 3DMark 2001 and Quake 3 Time Demo 1

Testing in Sandra

To my surprise the memory benchmarks showed that the Iwill motherboard had quite a lead over the Abit board. I expected the difference to be a lot smaller but it seems Iwill have tried incredibility hard to optimize the memory architecture of the KK266plusR. Both boards had very aggressive memory timings enabled in the BIOS. (Cas 2, fastest timings on the Iwill offering and Cas 2, turbo settings in the case of the abit. Both boards had four way interleaving enabled to.)

The drive indexing always varies a lot from one test to the next but to ensure fair testing both boards where defragged before starting the benchmarking and the index test was one run three times. An average score is represented in the graph above. Both boards handled the test extremely effectively, and thus I would consider they achieved the same result here.

Page Three: Testing Part Two

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