Author : RiStaR
Conclusion
Board features & Pricing
The Iwill P4HT-S sports a bright red PCB and a unique choice of the DIMM slots to ensure stability under high system frequency. The choice to implement a matching LED fan on the NorthBridge really titles this board as an enthusiasts' board. The board is quite well featured with Realtek 10/100MB LAN onboard, Silicon Image Serial ATA Controller, Promise ATA133 Controller, Realtek 6.1 Channel Audio, connectors for SPDIF, Memory Stick and Smart Card and of course the most important option is the support for DDR-333 memory.
BIOS & Overclockability
Iwill P4HT-S has a pretty nice BIOS with some tweakable settings like VCore up to 2.00V, FSB of up to 250Mhz, DDR Bus Frequency selectable for DDR 266/333 operation. However, the BIOS can still be further improved to include VAgp adjustment and all the ratios for memory bus. As is evident with the Sisoft Benchmarks, the ability to choose a 3:4 ratio would benefit performance tremendously though admittedly, it'll be very hard to find DDR memory to be capable of DDR460. Even though the VDimm was not able to be raised higher than 2.9V, it must be mentioned that it managed to let my normal DDR-333 memory run at DDR-433 with 2.8V. This shows that the board is stable enough to handle high frequency operation by default. There are however some quirks with the new bios. ( To-date there isn't even a single BIOS posted on Iwill's website ) For example, if the user made too many changes to the BIOS over a period of time, whenever you try to reboot your PC or try and quit from BIOS, you'll find that the board will power itself down. Also the ability to use the VCore of 2.00V is questionable. With my Enermax 431W, I was unable to power on the board with the VCore set to 2.00V. All I would be greeted would be the sound of things starting to turn on and a "pop" everything would turn off again. And lastly, the use of only one DIMM slot if the end-user wants to overclock. I'm not sure if you can blame Iwill for this. It seems to me more like a chipset issue. Look in the various forums and you'll notice what I'm trying to say.
Performance & Stability
Iwill P4HT-S is performing extremely well at DDR 433 mode. I'm typing up this review on it as it is. As mentioned during the benches, it can be seen that the i845PE performs basically like it's elder brethren the i845G. Only difference being support for "Hyper-Threading" CPUs. The stability is as good as it gets. I don't remember any boards coming from Iwill that had stability problems. This is said even though we had instability problems with the DDR Module in DIMM 1. But this only happened after a FSB of 150MHz which is already overclocking a fair bit. Seeing that boards based on the i845PE costs almost the same as boards based on the i845G chipset, it makes more sense to go for the i845PE as it will have a longer shelf-life due to it's support for "Hyper-Threading" CPUs. Of course unless you require onboard video to save costs. But then there is the i845GE chipset and that's another review by itself.
Iwill P4HT-S was given an
Editor's Choice SILVER Award!