ALi MAGiK 1: The Athlon gets a second DDR platform

The lone ranger is the first to market

We mentioned at the start of this review that at Computex, only a single motherboard manufacturer was supporting ALi, that being Iwill.  At Computex Iwill already had a board design complete, they were simply waiting on ALi to deliver a stable revision of their chipset.

In spite of the fact that many motherboard manufacturers have jumped on the ALi bandwagon in lieu of the delay of VIA’s Athlon solution, Iwill was still the first to announce support and thus it makes sense that they would be the first to production with a MAGiK1 based board. 

Iwill’s board is the KA266 and should be available shortly. 

Click to Enlarge

Issues

The board we received isn’t ready for public consumption yet with the issues we encountered being due to the relative immaturity of the MAGiK1 chipset.

For starters, there are some compatibility issues with the Radeon and the chipset, however updated AGP drivers should be able to remedy the problems.

The chipset is currently lacking in terms of IDE drivers, however ALi is apparently working on ATA/100 drivers for the Southbridge.  There is no word on an expected release date. 

Iwill supplied us with ATA/66 drivers that improved performance somewhat, however we are still awaiting full ATA/100 support from ALi. 

The KA266 didn’t show any major signs of instability during our testing.  Occasionally the board would fail to warm boot requiring a cold reboot of the test system, and moving from CAS2 down to the CAS2.5 setting in the BIOS would cause instability in 3D games/applications.  We tested with the CAS latency set to 2, however we could not confirm if this was indeed setting the latency to 2. 

The test setup wouldn't complete any runs of SYSMark 2000 which is the reason for the absense of that benchmark, an otherwise normal member to our benchmark suite.

Both of these issues will most likely be solved with the final release of the board, keep in mind that this is strictly an engineering sample that we performed our tests on, so the performance as well as any issues we discussed here can be improved upon between now and the point when the board/chipset is actually in the retail stream.