Iwill DVD266-R Dual Socket 370 Motherboard Review - PAGE 4Daryl Grant - Tuesday, May 22nd, 2001
Impressions
As BIOS memory settings vary from motherboard to motherboard, here are the ones available in the DVD266-R (BIOS version March 13, 2001):
I am not sure what the first setting “System Performance” does, but I found the best benchmark numbers were produced with the Enhance – 0T setting. As usual, I tweaked the board’s memory settings as far as they would go and the highest possible settings were achievable (as can be seen in the screenshot), although with some degree of instability. I had the most success with Windows 2000 as in Win98, Quake3 would not run with the settings used in the shot above; however, it would run in Win2k with the same settings. Business Winstone 2001 also froze once during testing with the same settings in Win98, but did not in Win2k (this problem was not repeatable so it was most likely a rare timing issue with the tweaked RAM).
With the standard, default memory settings, the DVD266-R was fairly stable, but as I noted above, the mileage varies with these tweaks, especially in Windows 98. Windows 2000, not surprisingly, was more stable over all.
The other tests – multitasking and large file transfer tests – were executed without any fuss. And now for some empirical results…
Test System
Operating systems:
Windows 98SE (v4.10.2222 A)
Windows 2000 (v5.00.2195 w/ SP1)
Hardware:
| CPU: | 2 x Intel Pentium III 800EB |
| Mobo: | Iwill DVD266-R |
| RAM: | 1 x 128MB Crucial PC1600 DDR SDRAM |
| Video Card: | Visiontek Geforce2 Ultra (Detonator drivers v6.50) |
| HDD: | 30Gb IBM Deskstar 75GXP 7200rpm, Ultra ATA-100 |
| CD-ROM: | Creative 52X CD-ROM |
Benchmarks
(Note: Windows 98 does not support SMP (multiple CPUs) so tests were performed in both Win98 (1 CPU) and Win2k (2 CPUs) to show results under both conditions.)
Sisoft Sandra 2001.0.7.10:
CPU Benchmark
CPU Multimedia benchmark
Memory Benchmark
Business Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001
| Quake Timedemo | Demo001 |
| Resolution: | 640 x 480 |
| Color Depth: | 16bit |
| Lighting: | Vertex |
| Geo. Detail: | Low |
| Tex. Detail: | Low |
| Tex. Quality: | 16bit |
| Text Filter: | Bilinear |