Computex 2000 Coverage Day 3: More Motherboards

Iwill

In spite of having one of the strongest R&D teams in Taiwan, Iwill is still one of the smallest if not the smallest motherboard manufacturer in the area. Regardless of size, they have a very interesting set of products that are set to debut in the upcoming months including what could become the world's first DDR Athlon motherboard. Iwill also claimed that they were shipping 500 i840 based motherboards each month which isn't a lot at all but they are at least shipping the boards whereas most other i840 designs have failed to even hit the market yet.

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Just like every other manufacturer, Iwill had an i815E motherboard on display. It does feature a CMD controller that allows it to boast ATA 100/RAID support. Another interesting tidbit of information Iwill left us with was that the CMD controllers you're seeing on motherboards are actually using RAID technology developed by AMI, which is why you will see Iwill boards with either CMD or AMI controllers.

AMI has had quite a bit of experience with RAID, so you should feel quite confident that a board outfitted with an AMI/CMD IDE RAID controller should have a pretty solid RAID implementation. According to Iwill, HighPoint is still in a maturing phase and until their drivers/chips do mature AMI/CMD will be the solutions they use in their motherboards. As far as the likelihood of HighPoint maturing to the point where their on-board controllers are preferable to the AMI/CMD solutions, Iwill says its quite possible.

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Iwill's VD133 Pro is pretty standard for a 133A based motherboard. The sample we looked at featured the HPT370 controller which provides ATA 100 support as well as IDE RAID functionality. The only complaint we had about the solution was the odd placement of the ATA 100 channels next to the 6th PCI slot. The VD133 Pro was the only Iwill board we saw that didn't use an AMI/CMD controller.

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1U Servers were pretty big at this year's Computex, mainly for their ability to be targeted in large volumes at ISPs, etc... For those of you that aren't familiar with the terminology, 1U refers to the height of the rackmount case you see before you. In contrast, AnandTech is hosted by dual Xeon servers that each run in their own 4U rackmount case.

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Before we move onto Iwill's Athlon products we'll take a look at the Slocket III. The Slocket III is a FC-PGA 370 to Slot-1 converter card with its own voltage regulator on it. While just about every other converter card just allows you to set the pins that control the voltage of your CPU, the Slocket III actually allows you to change the voltage supplied to the card on the card itself. This could come in handy for motherboards that can't quite deliver the proper voltage to the new Pentium III "Coppermine" CPUs or the new Celerons. But it has been a while since we've seen a motherboard that can't deliver the proper voltage to either of those CPUs.

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The KV200-R is Iwill's first KT133 based Socket-A motherboard for the Thunderbird/Duron. The only thing that really sets the KV200-R apart from the rest of the Socket-A/KT133 boards that we have seen is that this board makes use of the AMI MG80840 controller that adds support for IDE RAID as well as ATA 100. Once again, since AMI has had quite a bit of experience with RAID, you shouldn't see any problems with this implementation.