Iwill DVD266-R Dual Socket-370 Apollo Pro266 Preview

Adding the Sweet

Iwill did a very good job in providing a wide range of FSB speeds, with settings between 66MHz and 200MHz in 1MHz increments, which is essential if you want to overclock your CPU(s) to the limit. To help with the overclocking, you can also adjust the CPU core voltage between 1.60V and 2.05V in 0.05V increments right in the BIOS. This voltage will be applied to both CPUs, unlike the MSI 694D Pro where you can choose different voltage for each CPU.

One thing we noticed about the DVD266-R is that no matter what voltage we set in the BIOS, it only seemed to affect CPU0. According the BIOS's report from the onboard hardware monitor, CPU1 always runs at around 1.5V. Since the CPUs are designed to run at 1.65V, this could be one reason for the instability that we experienced, but more on that later.

Notice Vcore B is only 1.52V while Vcore A is at default

Once again, keep in mind that too much voltage on a CPU can permanently damage it, and in general a 10-15% CPU increase in core voltage is considered acceptable. With most Pentium III's designed for 1.65V operation, that means that 1.8V or 1.85V is probably the highest voltage you want to use when overclocking. Unfortunately, the DVD266-R lacks I/O voltage settings, which sometimes comes in handy when trying to stabilize an overclocked system.

Our evaluation sample did not include a heatsink on the 8633 North Bridge, but mounting holes are present, so it's possible that this will change with production units. There are four fan headers on the board, two for the CPUs and two for chassis fans. Note that one of the chassis fan headers is located in the middle of the board, next to the DDR DIMM slots, which is not really an ideal place.

Iwill chose the popular Winbond W83627HF hardware monitor. Within the BIOS, you can monitor the speeds of up to three fans as well as three temperatures, including the two CPUs through the on-die thermal diode. It also shows the current battery voltage.

Winbond W83627HF

Just like the KK266, Iwill also included quite a few memory tweaking options in the BIOS, including 2-bank and 4-bank interleaving and CAS timing. If you have high quality PC2100 memory, you should be able to squeeze out another few percentage points of performance.

Memory tweaking options.

Possibly because this is an engineering sample, the stability of the board is far from ideal. The board features four 2200uF and ten 1500uF capacitors around the CPU sockets, but it crashed a total of six times in a 24-hour span under our stress tests, which is slightly below average. However, keep in mind that this is just an engineering sample, where we can still see some manual wiring on the board, so the final production version could be a totally different story.

There is still some manual wiring on the board.

Unfortunately, these stability issues also prevented us from performing in-depth overclocking tests. We were able to increase the FSB speed to around 136MHz, but the system lost stability quickly. At speeds higher than that, the system would simply refuse to boot.