eXtra Performance or underachiever?

Author : Martyn Date : 10th Dec. 01

Part One: Retrospective

You may remember my excitable ramblings about the KK266plus I had on the test bench. Iwill, while becoming a late adopter, showed just what an amazing chip the KT133a was. The aforementioned board outperformed the Abit champion and showed some amazing benchmark results while still having room to include the C-media 5.1 onboard audio and ATA-100 RAID controller. It truly was amazing value for money even for hardened overclockers. Iwill then produced the first DDR based board and while performance increases were questionable, Iwill again proved they were willing to embrace new technology ahead of the chasing pack. For this board Iwill chose to use the first incarnation of the Ali Magik chipset. It was later confirmed that in the light of improved boards from AMD and VIA, this chip was a serious underperformer in all the popular benchmarks. Iwill have placed their faith in Ali again with this new board. With improved performance promised from the new 'C' stepping of the Ali chip, Iwill have certainly generated a lot of interest in the new XP333 with their many contests and press releases and on paper at least, this is the board of your dreams. ATA-133 support, DDR 333 'support', and the same high quality audio, while the name is hardly an inspirational choice, I can't wait to run this one through it's paces. See you on the other side...

Part Two: A Look At The Board

The layout of the KK266+ was hard to fault, what design choices have Iwill made with this new motherboard?

The clickable picture above shows the motherboard in its entirety. Some KA266 users might see the striking familiarity with this board and their own. Indeed it's basically the same board. Some early samples were the KA266 with an XP sticker placed over the name. Iwill obviously felt this was a winning design and the final retail board has changed very little. It's nice to see that Iwill have decided to include the excellent fan on their chipset though, some of you may recall this was removed from latter KK266 models due to increased cost.

Continued on Page Two
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