Review of the Iwill KA266 ALi Magic socket A

Iwill KA266 ALi Magic socket A

Friday, June 01, 2001

Introduction

We've been wanting to review to Iwill KA266 for a while now, but events always seemed to conspire against us, up until now. As it stands, the KA266 is already reputed to be among the top boards in the market. It's easy to see why, seeing as it comes in a RAID-equipped variation - the KA266-R, with support for PC1600 and PC2100 DDR-SDRAM, support for 133MHz FSB Athlon CPUs, and ATA100 drives.

So, with all that good stuff in mind, let's skip the intro and head in to the analysis!

Hardware Characteristics of the Iwill KA266

CPU

Supports Socket A for AMD® Athlon^TM & Duron^TM Processors
Supports CPU Speeds from 600 MHz up to 1.2 GHz and Higher

Chipset

ALi¨ M1647 (North Bridge) ALi¨ M1535D+ (South Bridge)

Form factor

ATX - 30.5cm X 24.4cm

Expansion

5 PCI - 0 ISA - 0 AMR - 1 AGP

Memory

3 x 184-pin DIMM sockets support up to 3GB of DDR PC1600 - PC2100

FSB

100Mhz, 101Mhz, 102Mhz, 103Mhz, 105Mhz, 107Mhz, 110Mhz, 120Mhz, 126Mhz, 100Mhz, 133Mhz, 136Mhz, 137Mhz, 140Mhz, 142Mhz and 146Mhz,

Vcore adj.

1.125 ˆ 1.850 in steps of 0.025v

Vio adj.

Audio

C-Media¨ CMI8378 Sound Chip

Configuration

Configuration of the CPU can accomplished through the use of jumpers, or by using the built-in BIOS commands..

A single on-board jumper can be used to set the FSB to either 100Mhz or 133Mhz.

Jumpers JP30, and JP33 can also be used to set the clock multiplier to between 5X and 12.5X.

A final jumper labeled VMEM serves to set the memory voltage to 2.5v, 2.6v or 2.7V

All other adjustments can be performed from within the BIOS.

The set the FSB frequency from within the BIOS, users should access the Iwill Smart Settings menu.

The Vcore can also be changed from there, as indicated by the table above.

Finally, from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu, users can tinker with a number of memory timing settings, including latency, Refresh Queue, Refresh Rate, etc...

Next: Technical details.