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IWill XP333-R Review February 15, 2002 Tuan 'Solace' Nguyen |
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Summary: IWill is a manufacturer that's coming out of the shadows - we've been hearing about more and more lately, and their latest effort, the XP333-R with support for DDR333 and ATA133 has been getting some positive buzz. Today, we give it the full treatment in the FS test labs.
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 12 ) |
I need bandwidth!
XP seems to be the suffix to use these days and that’s no surprise, considering that manufacturers want to associate their products with Microsoft’s Windows XP. Whatever the “XP” means to you, for manufacturers it means showing that they can keep up with the latest and greatest. Over the past year, Iwill has shown that it can do just that and more. Not only has it made a huge name for itself in the enthusiast community, Iwill also keeps tabs on the professional IT market, with boards that support the likes of dual Xeon processors and more.
There has been much talk about memory bandwidth with both the Athlon and the Pentium 4 (P4). Evidently, we all know that the best platform for the P4 to run on is a RDRAM-based solution. Because of its fast memory bus running at 400MHz (and soon 533MHz), the P4 obtains peak performance when paired with equally fast PC800 RDRAM. Unfortunately due to high prices, Intel was forced to introduce different solutions for its P4. On the other side of the river, AMD’s Athlon is also very much held back by memory bandwidth. Although not to the degree of the P4, the Athlon has a lot of growth potential. In fact, if the Athlon were using a quad-pumped FSB like the P4, it too would be significantly chained by current DDR RAM standards.
After being idle at PC2100 for a while, DDR RAM is moving forward as we see more and more modules on the market able to operate at 2400 and 2700. However, all this is being held back by the Athlon’s 266DDR (133MHz x 2) FSB ceiling. While it’s possible to run the Athlon with an FSB setting higher than 133MHz, stability issues come into play. Despite popular beliefs however, most overclocking stability comes from the peripherals on the motherboard. Cards and devices that use the PCI and AGP bus operate in co-ordinance with each bus’ specified speeds, which are ultimately governed by the FSB speed.
I hate fractions!
If you were a fan of the recent Iwill KK266 boards, you’ll immediately remember how strong it was on overclocking. Iwill hasn’t stopped since the success of its KK266 and in fact, has gone forward to produce some of the most overclockable boards in the industry. Iwill’s latest board, the XP333-R which we’re taking a look at today, is probably going to be one of the most, if not the most, overclockable boards ever.
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Overclocking today is easily done and usually accomplished by adjusting the frequency of the FSB or Front Side Bus on the motherboard. However the FSB frequency directly governs both the PCI and AGP frequencies, and as a result both bus ports will operate out of spec if the FSB is set too high. So if Intel and AMD are planning to continually increase FSB speeds, how would they ensure that PCI and AGP cards will operate in at the proper frequencies? The secret lies in frequency dividers. For example, to keep the PCI bus running at its specified 33MHz speed, a processor using a 100MHz FSB has a 1/3 FSB divider. In the same manner, a 133MHz FSB system has a 1/4 FSB divider to keep PCI speeds clocked to specifications. The AGP port is also kept stable using the same method. To keep the AGP port operating at say 66MHz, a 100MHz FSB system would employ a 2/3 AGP divider.
SIDEBAR: Iwill was a one of those “me-too” kind of board companies until its KK266 board broke loose and made a huge ruckus in the overclocking community.
| Specs and Speed | Page:: ( 2 / 12 ) |
Board Specifications
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Iwill XP333-R |
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| Chipset | Ali MAGiK 1 M1647C |
| Memory | 3 184-pin DIMM sockets (supports up to 3GB) |
| Drive Controllers | 1 FDD, 2 ATA133 Channels, 2 ATA133 RAID channels |
| Slots | 1 AGP, 5 PCI slots |
| Bus Speeds | 100-233MHz in 1MHz increments |
| USB | 1 USB 1.1 Controller supporting 4 ports |
An interesting thing to note is the Iwill-branded south bridge. Iwill however, is not stepping into the chipset business anytime soon and the south bridge is just an Ali M1535D+ chip.
Iwill “make things better”
As if overclocking were a fashion, Iwill has crammed its XP333 chock full of overclocking features. Included are options that allow you to change anything from FSB, to CPU core voltage, to CPU clock ratio. However, the most appealing feature was Iwill’s PCI clock divider options. Available to you are five options that give you flexibility for overclocking. No longer are you held back by FSB speeds and you don’t have to worry about toasting any of your add-in cards.
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Every motherboard has dividers that keep the PCI bus and AGP port from going out of range and change depending on which FSB frequency your processor uses. The problem comes when you start taking the FSB to higher non-standard frequencies. Standard frequencies are those defined by Intel and AMD and usually increment in multiples of approximately 33MHz. A motherboard that has its FSB overclocked to 120MHz and using a 1/3 PCI divider will have its PCI bus operating at 40MHz – a full 21% increase in PCI frequency and usually a cause for concern. Many PCI cards cannot operate much higher than their intended speed and many of these cards can only accept a small margin of error.
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It’s a good thing that Iwill has included plentiful dividers because you’re given the option to take the board’s FSB speed from 100MHz to 233MHz – that’s an effective 466MHz DDR FSB! Under our tests, we used a 1.1GHz Athlon MP and achieved 1328MHz using 166MHz FSB with an 8.0X multiplier.
SIDEBAR: Tuan uses an Apple *gasps* notebook – the Titanium G4.
| Features | Page:: ( 3 / 12 ) |
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.
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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.
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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.
SIDEBAR: You can check out Corsair’s XMS memory at Corsair.com
| System Setup | Page:: ( 4 / 12 ) |
Iwill XP333-R (ALi MAGiK 1 M1647C)
ABIT KR7A-RAID (VIA KT266A)
SiS 645 reference board (SiS 645)
Intel D845BG (i845D)
VIA 4in1 version 4.37
256MB Corsair PC2100 DDR SDRAM
256MB Corsair PC2700 DDR SDRAM – XMS Type
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board
Driver version Detonator 23.11
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Toshiba 12X DVD-ROM
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Desktop Resolution: 1024x768x32
Benchmarks
3DMark2000 ver 1.1 – 16-bit, 16-bit textures
3DMark 2001 - 16-bit, compressed textures
Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam Retail - Normal (16-bit)
Castle Wolfenstein MP Test - no compressed textures, (32-bit)
SysMark 2001
SIDEBAR: Running benchmarks in low resolutions help differentiate chipset speed.
| 3DMark 2000/2001 | Page:: ( 5 / 12 ) |
3DMark 2000 – DirectX 7.0
3DMark 2001 – DirectX 8.0
Analysis
While the ALi chipset does support DDR333 memory, its internal architecture limits its performance below that of VIA’s KT266A. This is primarily due to the use of V-Link in VIA’s current line of chipsets and we’ll be seeing faster technologies from VIA in upcoming chipsets. If ALi wants to remain close or become better than VIA in terms of performance, it may want to start looking into other methods of transporting information between south bridge and northbridge and northbridge and memory – HyperTransport?
SIDEBAR: Gatorade has 30 years of scientific research behind it and is considered a food by the FDA. Pediatricians also give Gatorade to small infants who are ill.
| 3DMark 2001 Framerates | Page:: ( 6 / 12 ) |
3DMark 2001 – Car Chase
3DMark 2001 – Dragothic
3DMark 2001 – Lobby
3DMark 2001 – Nature
Analysis
Performance between the MAGiK 1 and KT266A remains very close to each other but there’s no denying that KT266 is better. Because we’re testing chipset speed, remaining at low to average resolutions in games will allow you to see differences. High resolutions are too graphics card dependant and thus puts a cap on overall performance.
SIDEBAR: Tuan use to take an allergy pill every morning or risk heavy attacks during the day. But, ever since he discovered the miracle cure called Gatorade, he’s been without pills for more than 3 weeks.
| Serious Sam | Page:: ( 7 / 12 ) |
Serious Sam – OpenGL
Analysis
Our first real game test shows how DDR333 can really benefit a system. One of the slowest subsystem components in a computer is memory and the more bandwidth we have, more data can move faster to where it’s needed. Here we see that there’s obviously room to grow in the ALi chipset and by the way things look, Iwill’s XP333 could even support faster DDR memory. If this is indeed the case, then we’ll be able to witness even more real-world game performance from this board.
SIDEBAR: The editors of FiringSquad do not endorse or recommend Gatorade as a cure for any ailment. For that you’d need Sasparilla.
| Quake 3 High Quality | Page:: ( 8 / 12 ) |
Quake III Retail – High Quality
Analysis
Quake 3 doesn’t benefit from memory bandwidth like Serious Sam does and so we see the ALi chipset slightly lag behind the KT266 chipset. It appears as though id Software engines are becoming more and more reliant on video card power rather than system power. In John Carmack’s latest .plan update, he talks about how the new Doom engine will be graphics heavy and with NVIDIA and ATI adding more rendering features onto the their GPUs, most of the gruesome rendering math work will be GPU dependant, freeing up the host processor.
SIDEBAR: Although SMP (multi-processor) capabilities never really shot off in Quake 3 (it was really buggy) it’s highly probably that the new Doom will have native SMP support.
| Wolfenstein | Page:: ( 9 / 12 ) |
Return To Castle Wolfenstein MP Test
SIDEBAR: I’ve been playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault lately and it has amazing netcode. Even with 20+ people playing on a lowly DSL line (mine’s not lowly, it’s a 6Mbit/sec. line) game-play was smooth. Even when encountering high-ping players that had 300 pings or higher, most of them played just fine.
| SysMark | Page:: ( 10 / 12 ) |
SysMark 2001
Analysis
Whenever data needs to be moved fast, count on high bandwidth memory to get the job done. We’re seeing DDR333 getting put to use in productivity applications whereas games are more focused on raw CPU and graphics power. With a bit more tweaking either on ALi’s or Iwill’s side of things, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to push the XP333’s performance above that of KT266A. All the options are already in place, someone just needs to take initiative and optimize the options in such a manner that will enable users to leverage DDR333’s advantage over DDR266.
SIDEBAR: AMD is canceling its Duron MP project. However, the Duron processor will still be based on the Morgan core which still will support SMP, it’s just AMD won’t officially launch a line called Duron MP. Simply look for Duron units that are 1GHz or higher and you will have an SMP-capable Duron.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 11 / 12 ) |
Pros
DDR333
Without a doubt, the Athlon family can definitely take advantage of more memory bandwidth. With DDR33 or PC2700, we’re also able to push the FSB higher. For a while now, Intel’s Pentium 4 has been reaping the bandwidth benefits of 800MHz RDRAM and with PC2700, the Athlon is starting perform almost as fast as a P4 in memory intensive applications. The one advantage that DDR has over RDRAM is its low latency. RDRAM has high bandwidth but also very high latency, and a small bit-width.
UltraATA/133
It’s definitely faster than ATA100, but probably not noticeable if you’re not playing with HDTach all day. Recently at Platform Conference, we were able to see Maxtor demonstrate some of its ATA133 drives with HDTach and there are noticeable gains on the graphs, but that’s likely where they’ll stay. However, once you begin to stripe in multiple drives, you’re more likely to see faster response in terms of burst performance.
UltraATA/133 RAID
And striping you will do once you take advantage of the XP333-R’s onboard RAID controller. Although it’s not the greatest, you’re still given two extra channels for use, and these days we need all the channels we can get.
Overclocking
Iwill continues to show that it has strength in this department. From inside the industry, we’ve been hearing and also noticing a lot of changes going on over at Iwill, especially in the engineering department. As a result, you’re given all the overclocking tools you’ll need to take your system faster and higher. We absolutely love the PCI dividers and just recently, Iwill has updated its BIOS to include adjustable AGP dividers. These dividers help greatly and are invaluable to overclocking success. We were able to reach 166MHz FSB on a 100MHz FSB Athlon MP processor quite easily thanks to the dividers as well as core voltage settings. Every other company should do what Iwill is doing in this department.
Documentation
Documentation and packaging just keeps getting better and better in Iwill’s products. Besides the manual, the quick reference poster that’s included provides a convenient and easy way to get up and running without fuss. Lots of pictures are shown to guide any user through the installation process and jumper diagrams are easily comprehensible.
Cons
ALi Chipset
It has DDR333 support but it’s held back by its own performance. Even with speedy PC2700 locked and loaded, the ALi MAGiK was only able to at most, stay on part with VIA’s KT266A but not surpass it; most of the time it fell behind by a few points here and there. While the difference is small, it would have been smaller had we used PC2100 to test the board. However, users who purchase a XP333/XP33-R will likely choose PC2700 DDR modules over any previous generation. Initially we weren’t quite sure whether to put the board’s performance in the Pros or Cons section due to the fact that Iwill’s excellent overclocking features allow the board to perform extremely well compared to the competition. All-in-all, the XP333’s overclocking is the ALi MAGiK’s saving grace.
Jumpers
There’s still a large amount of toggling features that could have been moved into the BIOS setup rather than be hardwired onto the board by jumpers. Features like on-board sound and the HighPoint controller should be available inside the BIOS for easy adjusting. Iwill is advertising its “Bye Bye Jumper” feature so we’d like to see those jumpers disappear on future boards, or even board skews.
Features
HighPoint RAID – not the best solution and currently, only Maxtor has ATA133 drives so an ATA100 Promise controller would have been more pleasing. Onboard sound, while being good as far as onboard solutions go, is an option that can really go. Luckily, it can be disabled.
SIDEBAR: Adaptec is just about ready to launch Ultra320 SCSI which has double the throughput of the fastest SCSI currently available. If you want to go even faster, Fiber-Channel is the way to go.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 12 / 12 ) |