***IWILL KA266-R info ASAP PLEASE***

[ironxman99]

i need some help deciding whether i should buy this mobo ASAP!!!! ($110)

first of all, does this only take DDR ram, or can i use regular sdram as well?
secondly, i have an ati radeon 64mb, is this going to be a problem?
i'm planning on getting a tbird soon, and overclocking a little, but not much

i've been reading a lot of reviews (but most are on pre-releases) and some posts and can't decide/figure out

please don't give me general information as i've read most of it already.. thanx!

 

[HexVector]

The Iwill Ka266-R only takes DDR. 3 DIMM slots, for max of 3gigs.
Won't be a problem with the Radeon, it has AGP.
The Iwill KA266 does allow for some decent overclocking, although their are better
mobos for that task.

It works pretty well, I ordered the non-raid version (only have one HD)
There are better DDR performers out there mainly from AMD 760 chipset or KT266 from Asus.

EDIT:
There is also the Asus version of the ALi Magik1 chipset. The Asus edges out in performance.
If you want the best I recommend the Asus A7M266 based on the AMD 760. Or the Biostar M7MIA, same thing.

 

[ironxman99]

i heard there were compatibility issues w/ the radeon and the mobo

 

[HexVector]

I never heard of that. Perhaps, what have you heard is the cause of the problem? Sell your Radeon and get a Geforce2 Ultra or Geforce3

 

[Technonut]

The Radeon issue was taken care of a good while ago on the KA266-R. I have run the Radeon on the KA266-R, and it worked fine.

 

[buck]

Its a average ddr mobo and I liked it when I had it. Absolutely no problems with the radeon. Only thing that this mobo is still dealing with is seating the ram properly, other than that nothing...
Matt

 

[dude53]

I will ka266 has isue with the usb not working has far I can read it can not be fix and the overclocking is just okay had my duron 600 at 933 (142 fsb)and 9.5 x100 950 but not stable but the same duro 600 would do 1000 on My ATv stable like a rock for quite a few months.so beware of usb

 

[HexVector]

EDIT: Double

 

[HexVector]

Dude53, what are you talking about? Both USB ports work fine on my Iwill KA266.

 

[Democritus10]

I'm having USB problems with my KA266-R with Windows 2000. Everything thing was working great (after I figured out that one has to set a zip drive to 'none' in the BIOS for the RAID drives to be recognized by fdisk, etc) until I enabled the USB ports in the BIOS to install an Epson 1270 printer and 1240U scanner. Without even getting a chance to install the drivers (and with the USB devices still turned off, but the port enables), Windows was running noticeably slower. Now it keeps freezing temporarily (5 sec) quite often (every minute or so). When I monitor the CPU usage during the freezes, the usage jumps to 100%. The freezes occur even when I'm not doing anything. Very strange. If I turn off the USB ports in the BIOS, everything is ok again. Perhaps someone can explain this to me (I know that since the USB ports are hot-swappable, the system has to periodically check the ports to see if a device is on or not, but it shouldn't use up this much CPU power).

I've had 2 KA266-R's in the past week and have encountered some very frustrating issues:

On one board, I could not do a warm reboot, even with the newest BIOS. I'd have to so a complete shutdown and power on everytime. Pretty annoying when you're installing Windows, etc. Then the BIOS dissapeared all of a sudden after one of those shutdowns. And there was no BIOS installed when I initially bought the board as well (brand new).

On another board, I had problems getting my hard drives on the RAID channel to be recognized by several different partitioning/formatting applications. After 2 days of constant frustration, someone mentioned that there is a Zip drive issue with the KA266-R. So I set the zip drive to 'none' in the BIOS and everything worke fine.

Many have stated that this board is stable and pretty decent. I don't doubt their claims. Just be forewarned that are some issues with this board, especially in terms of post-production quality control (but this seems to be true of more boards lately).