Review of Iwill KA266-R (DDR) board at X-bit labs !

[Mem]

I don`t think this as been posted yet but with NFS4 you never know anyway go here for the review click here

Btw I did do a quick search to make sure.

 

[Remedy]

Good board, but i wouldn't put one together unless i was throwing a entry level server up or a hefty single processor workstation. I think some ppl read into amd & DDR just a bit too much, they seem to think games are going to benefit from this board when last time i checked for bottlenecks it was the Video card itself and not the board and cpu @ 750 and above.

 

[yathinkicare]

remedy has a point... but how bout the video cards of the future!..

64mg of ddr memory on a video card is awsome... can't wait till games max that out...

 

[Mem]

I`ve to agree however there are faster DDR boards in the pipeline ,so we will have to see 6-12 months down the road how things improve.

 

[Fumiup]

I don't know...

I had bought a KV200-R when they first came out a couple months ago and it's performance was terrible compared to any other board. My hard drive performance was slower than my old K6-3 system. I quickly returned it and got an ABIT KT-7 instead.

After my initial contact with I-Will I'm skeptical about how their boards will compare to other DDR boards.

 

[Noriaki]

Yeah I have to agree with Remedy...

DDR is pretty sweet...but...

Games bottleneck on the Video card. I have an Athlon 550 with 128MB of RAM on a K7M...I'm going to buy some more RAM this friday (128MB is not enough for Win2000, 384MB would be much mroe pleasant), and a TBird SlotA 700Mhz ($75 shipped, how could I say no?) I'll overclock the TBird as much as I can...and seriously I expect this guy to last at me least another year if not longer...

I have a K6-2/350 second system (well it's my uncles) with 64MB of RAM and a 6gig hard drive...he runs all his office apps and stuff on it just fine. Sure my 384MB of SDRAM won't have the best office app benchamrk scores...but seriously...do you really doubt that a 700+ TBird with 384MB of RAM is not fast enough for office apps? i didn't think so...

And I'll drop in a nice zippy video card with hardware T&L and when HW T&L starts to take off that will decrease the CPU load even more...

Games bottleneck on the Video card and standard office apps have been bottleneck on human input time since about a P2/300 with 64MB of RAM (edit: or maybe hard drive speed...but I'm not about to go get a 10k RPM SCSI drive..I dunno about you )

The only place DDR will show real world improvements is in workstation/server usage (especially graphical workstations which do most of the rendering work in software not hardware)

Will your game framerates go up? Yes...especially at 640x480...but will you notice it? No...we don't play at 640x480 and games are to dependant on other things. DDR SDRAM is definately better than Rambust...but I don't think we need either for main memory yet.

 

[Danlz]

25% mobo cost premium + 25% DDR cost premium worth 3% performance in office apps?

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

I hope the production board performs better than that...

5% overall improvement over PC133 + T-Bird isn't so hot. :frown:

 

[Mem]

True about price to performance, however prices will fall & when faster DDR boards with faster ram will become available I`m sure eventually they will drop in price ,remember PC133 ram was quite expensive when it first came out,but soon dropped,I would think the best option is to let the dust settle & see how price & performance look 6 months or so down the road, I for one can wait that long or even 12 months with with no problem.

 

[RagingGuardian]

Last I heard the Ali magik was a better performer than the 760. I'll still wait for an Asus solution though.

 

[backWERD]

It definately is a better performer than the amd760