Iwill KK266 Socket-A KT133A ATX

Up To Par

As noted before, Iwill cannot simply make a board that is just as good as the others, they need to go one step further and offer some additional features. Otherwise, potential customers will simply go with the bigger name manufacturers. They don't have to please the OEM builders right now because of their size, putting Iwill in the unique position that allows them to focus primarily on the hardware enthusiast market. To do that, tweaking and overclocking are obviously the two most important areas to work on.

Even though they are not part of the official specification, several options have become defacto standards on recent motherboards. For starters, the ability to modify the CPU multiplier ratio has been implemented on all popular Socket-A motherboards nowadays. Initially during the KT133 era, some manufacturers were able to pull the settings into the BIOS while most others stuck with jumpers or dipswitches. With the current wave of KT133A motherboards this has all changed (for the better) and all multiplier ratio controls are found in the BIOS.

Further, a variety of FSB settings is another area of focus in recent Socket-A boards. With the migration to KT133A, there seems to be a newfound focus on FSB speeds for overclocking, ideally in 1MHz increments. Also included in recent motherboards is CPU and I/O voltage settings, something that can come in very handy when overclocking.

With all the other boards out there already providing such features, the ladder that Iwill has to climb becomes even longer; but to our surprise, they managed to do so beautifully. With the KK266, Iwill includes multiplier settings from 5.0 to 12.5 (in 0.5 increments) within the BIOS under the Iwill Smart Settings panel. Therefore you can modify your multiplier ratio easily, provided that your have your unlocked your AMD CPU already.

Also included in the BIOS are FSB speed and CPU core voltage settings. The KK266 provides a wide range of FSB speeds from 100MHz to 166MHz in 1MHz increments. Note that, like many other KT133A boards, these FSB speeds are broken into two ranges - 100-132MHz and 133-166MHz. The range is selected by a jumper close to the CPU socket.

The CPU core voltage settings available in the BIOS are from 1.525V to 1.850V (in 0.025V increments), which is pretty much the same as other KT133A boards. For I/O voltage, you can either stay with the default, which is 3.4V, or increase the voltage by 5% or 10% through a jumper. Planning for the future, Iwill has implemented a three-phase power design on the KK266, which guarantees (in theory) enough current for higher speeds Athlon processors, up to 1.5GHz or higher.

There are also plenty of tweaking options available within the BIOS as well. For example, not only can you change the CAS latency settings for the memory, you can also select between 2-bank or 4-bank memory interleaving.

There are a total of four fan headers on the motherboard, and using the integrated hardware monitor, you can read up to two fan speeds and two temperatures inside the PC Health panel.