The Three Musketeers: Athlon Platforms For 133 MHz FSB

The Boards

AMD760 - MSI K7 Master

MSI provided us with its upcoming pagebreak

ALi MaGiK1 - Iwill KA266 Rev. 1.1

This is the second KA266 board from Iwill that we received. The first revision was unfortunately not providing very good benchmark results, which was the reason why I refrained from reviewing it at that stage. The new revision 1.1 and the latest BIOS from December 8, 2000 provides improved performance, so that it finally makes sense to test this motherboard.

It comes equipped with three DDR-SDRAM DIMM-slots, one AGP-slot, five PCI slots, and an excellent on-board C-Media CMI-8738 3D audio chip. The BIOS allows overclocking in all flavors. The processor bus clock can be changed in small intervals and the CPU-multiplier can be adjusted to any value between x5 and x12.5. Therefore it is a very handy platform to owners of 100 MHz FSB Duron or Athlon processors who want to run their processors at 133 MHz FSB.

While you will see that the performance of the KA266 is unable to reach MSI's K7 Master, the Iwill board performed pleasantly stable without any flaws or problems. The ATA100 feature of the ALi M1535+ south bridge chip worked flawlessly and provided a slightly better performance than we have seen with VIA's 686B south bridge chip so far.