Features

Cool literature

Delivering a product is one thing, but making sure that your customer gets setup without trouble and taking care of their worries is another. Opening the box reveals an incredibly detailed quick setup guide that manages to pack a lot of information into the page, without slowing you down or overwhelming you. Full color pictures are included for those unfamiliar with setting things up and user-friendly diagrams illustrate exactly which jumpers can be found where and what they do. All other forms of literature, including the manual, are well written and easy to understand.

Good documents go a long way

Board features

Iwill’s XP333 comes in two flavors, one with ATA133 RAID and the one without. The XP333-R comes with a HighPoint ATA133 RAID controller that supports levels 0, 1 and 0+1. We really aren’t fans of HighPoint’s controllers and would have preferred a Promise controller instead but apparently HighPoint was the first to support ATA133 RAID. You can tell that the HPT372 controller isn’t very well designed because of the sheer number of pin counts that it has compared to Promise’s controllers which have about 1/4 the lines and are still faster.

An Iwill southbridge?

Serial definitely needs to go

What? No Digital?

Booo…

Onboard sound is handled by a C-Media 6 channel audio DSP. It supports the most popular sound field APIs including 3D HRTF functions and EAX reverbs. Iwill has also included an expansion back plate that has jacks for rear, center and low frequency effects (LFE) speakers. Examining the audio back plate reveals that more connectors like digital optical and coaxial in/outs could have included, but for one reason or another were left out.

Showing that it’s determined to make the XP333 an overclocker’s dream, Iwill chose ALi’s chipset to give support to PC2700 or DDR333 RAM. But besides high-speed memory, there are two jumpers on the XP333 that allow you to set memory voltage. We used Corsair’s PC2700 XMS DDR modules for our tests and they are able to reach extremely high speeds without the aid of power increases but for those with frisky RAM, the option to set memory input power may come in handy.

Despite all its goodness, the XP333 does have some small cause for concern. A lot of the ability to toggle features on/off on the XP333 should have been placed inside the BIOS setup. Things like on-board sound should be placed inside the BIOS as well as the HighPoint controller and the memory voltage settings. While it’s not a serious thing, eliminating as many jumpers as possible can save a significant amount of time when you’re changing and tweaking your system.