A Lackluster Premiere: ALi Aladdin-P4

Impossible - 166 MHz Memory Clock At 100 MHz FSB Clock

The most important news is that we were unable to convince the RAM to operate at 166 MHz with an FSB clock speed of 100 MHz. Although there is a plethora of settings that can be made in BIOS, there was no option for DDR333 (100 MHz FSB/ 166 MHz RAM/ 33 MHz PCI).

We're still hoping that when ALi modifies its BIOS, it will have a version that offers 166 MHz with default values. Because of this limitation, we had no choice but to run the test with a memory clock of 133 MHz (DDR266). However, we did set the CAS latency to 2.0, thus tweaking the board to reach maximum performance.

Despite the fact that we used what we have discovered to be the best RAM available (Micron DDR-SDRAM, 266, CL2), we could not manage to run our tests in Turbo or Ultra-2 modes. So, we performed the entire test in Fast mode and CL2.0.

The board doesn't have any settings for a memory clock speed of 166 MHz - the BIOS tells exactly the same story.

View of the North Bridge (left) and the South Bridge of the ALi Aladdin-P4 chipset.