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Introduction

We don’t get too many dual mobos coming through these parts, but when we do I am always slightly more giddy than usual. There is something about being at the helm of two phat CPUs that I find most excellent, which you already know if you’ve read our last dual mobo review, that of the EPoX D3VA.

The trend continues with the Iwill DVD266-R. This board runs on the VIA Apollo Pro 266, which brings DDR SDRAM to the Socket 370 platform. It also brings another new feature, that I described in the Soyo 7VDA review, called V-Link. Here is an excerpt from that review that explains what V-Link is:

A less obvious addition to the Apollo Pro 266 is the introduction of V-Link: VIA’s answer to Intel’s two year old IHA (“Intel Hub Architecture”). Up until the Pro 266, VIA chipsets relied on the 33MHz PCI to connect the North Bridge and South Bridge. The obviously problem with this is that of limited bandwidth. At 33MHz, the 32-bit PCI bus can muster about 133MB/s of bandwidth that needs to be shared with not only all of the PCI cards but the data traffic between the North and South Bridges as well. This was fine back in the day, but with today’s technology this setup has become a little outrageous.

Outrageous indeed. This relatively big step in VIA chipset technology will give newer, non-Intel motherboards some headroom to grow into as bandwidth demands are ever-increasing, and ever-pushed to the limit.

Although it’s one of the smaller motherboard manufacturers in the business, Iwill has shown some strong contenders in the past (the KV200-R, for example), even against the big names like Asus and AOpen. Today we’ll take a closer look at their latest dual PIII creation, the DVD266-R.

Specs

CPU Interface	2 x Socket370 (Dual CPU)
Chipset	VIA Apollo Pro 266 VT8633 V-Link Host North Bridge VT8233 V-Link Client South Bridge
IDE	2 x UltraDMA ATA 100/66/33 channels 2 x ATA 100/66 RAID channels via AMI HyperDisk MG80649
RAM	4 x 168pin DDR SDRAM DIMM slots (4GB max)
Expansion	1AGP (4x), 5PCI (all full length)
FSB Speeds	66MHz to 200Mhz in 1MHz steps (via BIOS)
Core Voltages	1.60V to 2.05V in 0.05V steps (via BIOS)
I/O Voltages	n/a
AGP Voltages	n/a
Other	onboard audio (C-Audio CM8738 4.1channel), Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG with Iwill Smart Setting

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