Value Dual Socket-370 Motherboard Roundup - August 2001

Iwill DVD266-R

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A while ago we received a preliminary engineering sample of the DVD266-R from Iwill and we were very impressed by the board, not only because they were the first to have a working sample of a dual Apollo Pro266 board, but because it performed extremely well. The only problem we encountered with that early board was stability, which also prevents us from determining the overclocking ability of the board.

Now that we have the final version of the board, we have to say that it is even better than we previously thought. For starters the stability issues we experienced have been completely corrected, and it is just stable as any other board we have tested. Further,, the performance of the board is very impressive as well, thanks to the added memory bandwidth provided by DDR SDRAM. The board also features the AMI RAID controller, which supports all three RAID modes we commonly see. Of course, you can also use it as an additional dual channel IDE controller if you don't need RAID functionality.

The AMI IDE RAID controller.

The retail version of the board also lacks the ACR slot we saw in the engineering sample. Iwill's intention in doing so is to cut the cost of the motherboard further without really sacrificing useful features. This of c ourse makes sense since most servers will want to use dedicated PCI NIC's.

Another impressive move by Iwill is that they have included two Taisol HSF units with all DVD266-R's. The HSF is not the largest nor the best you can find, but it's considerably larger than the retail HSF units provided by Intel and they've done a great job for us here in the lab.

AGP tweaking options in the BIOS.

Memory tweaking options.

We did have one problem with the board and it came in the area of memory compatibility, something we don't see too often these days. Whenever we used Smart Technology's PC2100 DDR SDRAM with Samsung chips, the system crashed during the installation of Windows 2000 regardless of BIOS settings. Moving to Corsair PC2100 DDR SDRAM resolved the problem. Therefore if you are planning on getting this board, make sure you check Iwill's compatibility list for the correct memory modules.

The second and third set of USB connectors.

USB ports setup inside the BIOS.

Overclocking on the board was also quite good. Even though the board is using DDR memory, which tends to have more critical timing requirements, we were able to hit 145MHz FSB without losing any stability, thanks in part to the plethora of tweaking options in the BIOS.

In short, the Iwill DVD266-R is a very good buy. At a price of around $210, you not only get the best performance possible for a value dual Socket-370 motherboard, but you also get two nice HSF units as well. The only thing to look out for is DDR SDRAM compatibility, where some modules might not work with the board.