Socket A Is Coming: Test of 10 Boards

IWill KV200-R

BIOS-Version: July 31, 2000

Board Revision: 35100A

Iwill is one of the first manufacturers that plans to ship a motherboard with DDR support based on the ALi MAGiK 1 (KA266-R). Until this actually happens you can fall back on the KV200-R. The R stands for RAID because the board comes with the MG80649 from American Megatrends. Also on board is a sound system based on the CMI8738 from C-Media .

There is a mistake in the labeling of the IDE channels: The two connectors on the outside belong to the VIA chipset, the two on the inside are controlled by the AMI chip. The labeling says the opposite!

According to the benchmarks the board delivers the expected performance but it still lands in last place. Apparently IWill mainly focussed on the implementation of the RAID chip because we discovered another problem. Activating the AGP Fast Writes in the BIOS always caused a crash.

The approach is good but performance and reliability could use some more work.