Iwill KA266 (ALi MAGiK 1 chipset)..

[PlunX]

Has anyone tried this board? I'm either going to be getting the KK266 (VIA KT133-A chipset) or the KA266.. Which one is better in performance/overclocking/etc.?

 

[Technonut]

I have an KA266 RAID sitting on the bench right now waiting on a 256MB stick of Crucial PC1600. (under $100.00 for a 256MB DDR stick) The PC1600 is only to test the board. I am waiting for Crucial to get some PC2100 in soon if I decide to make the IWill a "keeper". It has 3 DDR slots, and multiplier/voltage control in BIOS, and with jumpers. It looks well laid out, and has had good reviews. The onboard sound that has 4 speaker support and 3D Positional Audio is supposed to be very good quality. It also has a pretty good driver CD with utilities, and PCcillin.

I will probably have it setup and put through the paces by tomorrow evening, and will post back my results if you are interested.

EDIT: As I looked into the BIOS, I did not see multiplier adjustments. There are voltage adjustments. The multiplier adjustments are done with jumpers, then the CPU/DDR clock can be adjusted in the BIOS. Maybe a future BIOS revision will take care of it. I was led to beleive by the reviews that the multiplier adjustment BIOS feature was present. Still a great board though. Once you find the "right spot" with the jumpers, set it, and forget it. I have also found that I was lucky in obtaining a Revision 1.3 board. The earlier revisions seemed to have had some issues, especially with the Radeon. The Rev. 1.3 and latest BIOS works fine with a 64MB retail Radeon.

 

[PlunX]

I'm totally interested.. Where have you seen reviews, though? The only review I've seen was at HardwareCentral and it was for the KK266..

 

[Technonut]

If you can get through to the review at ClubOverclocker, they said:


<< this ALi chipset is rock solid stable possibly making the Iwill KA266-R the best motherboard of 2000. In fact, after talking it over with other members of ClubOC, we are prepared to name the Iwill KA266-R, Club Overclocker's Motherboard Of The Year! Heck, I have to admit it, I even tossed my SoundBlaster Live! sound card to the side and I'm now using the on board audio.&quot; -- >>


Just check out IWill's Site, and you will see the review links. I just had to give it a whirl. The PC1600 should be here in the morning by FedX, and I am putting some customers off to play with it

 

[Technonut]

PlunX, So far all day, the KA266 RAID has been an awesome, stable mobo! I am not using RAID right now, so I cannot comment on that, but the onboard sound is incredible. I threw in a loctite unlocked Duron 750, 64MB retail Radeon, ATA66 IBM 15GB hard drive, and a Acer 50X CDROM. I am still learning to tweak the BIOS and DDR RAM settings.

Right now, I have the 750 set at a 133/133 CPU/DDR Clock, memory set at Ultra. (It still has another Ultra2 setting past that I have not tried yet.) It is POSTing and running at 1000MHz. It is rock solid, looping the 3DMark2000 demo as I type this, and have looped the Q3A Demo for awhile before that. I flashed to the latest BIOS and drivers.

What surprised me is that the cheap PC1600 Crucial DDR RAM (256MB for under $100.00) is doing fine at the default PC1600 voltage at 133. Here are some early benchmark #'s:

750 Duron @ 1000 133/133

Sandra CPU....2831/1381

Sandra MultiMedia....3322/4615

Sandra Memory....522/759

I still have more tweaking to do, and it is hard to tell how much more I could get out of it. Hell, I have not even tried to underclock the Duron and really raise the FSB yet!

I will be doing some Content Creation Winstone 2000 tests soon, after I figure out some better tweaks. It seriously looks like this board is going to find a home in my primary box, and my KT7AR put on backup system status if things keep going as they are.

I can't imagine what my 1200 T-Bird will do on this IWill board. If the RAID functions as well or better than the Highpoint, I will (lol) be a happy camper. I have not been this impressed with a mobo for awhile, and I have built a bunch. I'll keep you posted on my further progress later. (It looks like another Mountain Dew Night )

EDIT: This KA266-R also supports up to 3GB DRAM

 

[Geocross]

New BIOS!! KA266 bios 2/15/01

The most stable overclocking motherboard just got better!!!

This is the bios for 1.3 or later. They have another for 1.1 &amp; 1.2. This is also the non Raid (they have one for that too)

 

[koltzy]

The kk266 is pretty much the king of overclocking, even moreso than the ka266, due to the inherent complications with a ddr memory bus when messing with the i/o and core voltages.
That is not to say the KA isn't a great overclocker. I weighed the choices as well, and chose the KA. Even if the performce is the same or less than that of a SDRAM kk266, the KT133a solution is mature and maxed out right now. A few bios updates and more mature drivers will undoubted boost the KA in the near future. It has more potential for further performance gains than a KT133a board. Besides, when I want another new system, and have to sell this one, it will be easier to sell a DDR system, than a comparatively 'Old' SDRAM system.

 

[onestah]

check out fullon3d.com/reports/ddr/index.shtml#top.
the board you know is not the one you'll get.

the production board is not the one that has all of the overclockability that they had promised.

apparently the test boards that do have the overclockability are stamped with different letters right on the board.

iwont has yet to release that one. my guess is that they'll have to release it as an entirely different model.

:|

 

[Geocross]

what are you talking about? The revision 1.3, which is the one that is sold retail, is the newest revision with the overc,lockablility. Thsi is not to say further versions won't be made, but the current board offers the best overclockability of all the DDR boards out so far. The board they used in the test at Fullon were the earlier revision, which the 1.3 is based.

 

[Technonut]

I really like this KA266-RAID. It is a nice board. I have been using the RAID0 setup with 2 Maxtor ATA100 40GB drives, it was easy to setup, and performs well. The only thing that I would like to see is the ability to raise/lower the I/O voltage to at least 3.5 The DDR RAM jumper voltage adjustment is good, along with the Multiplier jumpers. If it only had an I/O adjustment I would keep it as my primary system, but I think I am going back with my KT7AR until IWill comes out with a BIOS that has the I/O adjustment.

 

[onestah]

look, i'm only trying to figure this out myself and in the process attempting to give some context to the situation. i was told weeks ago that there were to be revisions and that the 1.3 was to be the board that we all expected. however, i hadn't heard anything beyond that, dig??

 

[Geocross]

All I am saying is that the 1.3 board is the latest Iwill board, and the one that Kevin at Fullon gave such high praise to. That is not to say further revisions won't be coming out....

 

[onestah]

my question to you is, where the hell is a boy to find that damn board??
and how do know that it's legit w/o seein it??

 

[Geocross]

go to Pricewatch, they have tons of listings. Newegg is probably where I'll end up buying from

 

[onestah]

even through pricewatch an index of wholesalers,
how is one to know that the ka266r board they order isn't gonna be
the revision 1.1 board??
which by the way i don't want!

 

[Geocross]

then i guess you shouldn't buy one....

 

[SammyBoy]

how would you guys recomend overclocking this thing?

reading about ddr overclocking confuses me.....im a newbie

 

[hud0]

Has anyone tried this board out in Windows 2000?
Are there compatibility problems with the AGP/NVIDIA/WIN2k
problems like VIA's chipsets have?

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[koltzy]

I bought the IWILL KA266 from Newegg on pricewatch (and a Radeon LE 32mb DDR). The board is a version 1.3 (the latest). I upgraded the BIOS to Feb 15th rev right away. Got the Hyper-Z hack installed. Bought 256mb PC1600 Crucial DDR from SR Systems. Unlocked a Duron 700 processor with a conductor pen, cranked the bus to 133 times 6=800mhz (you need to change the jumper AND the bios). Works great. I want to stay at a low speed until I pound the system with some serious doo doo and be sure of stability at 133fsb. I used the recommended system settings from lostcircuits.com to keep the Radeon and the memory happy (along with the new rev. board, and new bios). I would get this combo over the KT133A combos. The performance is roughly the same or better (with more room to grow when the ALI platform matures, and IWILL bangs out a few more bioses), and it will be easier to sell when I want some new stuff. (when ALL new machines have DDR or RDRAM it will be hard to move a SDRAM system, regardless of claimed performance.

 

[j@cko]

i bet your PC1600 will easily do PC2100.

 

[Reynaldo]

I have an Iwill KA266 board and I'm not able to install Win2000. I successfully installed Win98 and WinME, but not Win2000. I thought it might be a problem with my Win2k CD, but was able to succcessfully install the OS on another system using the same CD. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Do I need some type of update.

Thanks for any help!

 

[sabka]

I've had the KA266-R with PC2100 since Jan 5th now - rock stable.
Running Win2K fine and no probplems so far.
I really like this board - Bios flash was a breeze (except using 2 disks to update bios - one to boot and another one to flash)

Sabka

 

[Judgement]

Everyone with Revision 1.3, how do your benchmarks compare to those of DDR boards on the AMD chipset? I've read several times that the AMD chipset blew the ALi chipset out of the water which is what kept me away from getting this board yet.

 

[Planktune]

bump

 

[nippyjun]

ttt