Overclocking and System Setup
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
Surprisingly, the Iwill KD266 offers a wide variety and very complete set of overclocking options. Users of the KA266 motherboard from Iwill will instantly recognize the comfortable settings available to them.Memory settings include the option to easily change CAS settings as well as timings. Unspecific names are used, as on most boards, such as ‘Ultra 2’ is the fastest DRAM setting. Multipliers are fully adjustable as well from 5.0x to 12.5x in the bios. Also, the standard voltage modifications are available. Most impressively, Iwill has allowed the user to set FSB options of 95 MHz to 180 MHz in single MHz increments. Again, this decision to include this baffles me, simply because not many OEMs and system builders would want to edit these options or allow their customers to edit them. However, overclocker’s and tweaker’s surely appreciate them.
In fact, I was able to reach a staggering FSB speed of 157 MHz on a Duron 950 MHz processor. Running at 155 MHz x 6 brought us a very memory friendly 930 MHz speed. Using a FSB of 140 MHz and a multiplier of 9x, I could get the Duron 950 MHz to run at 1.26 GHz very stable on the KD266.
A few of you have recently emailed me asking me to include stability and installation test results in my reviews. I haven’t done so up to now and I probably won’t because of the following reasons: I don’t have the resources to properly do so. Installing Windows 98 on my test system and then claiming that ‘I had no problems with installation.’ tells you, the reader nothing and isn’t helpful in the least. Similarly, saying ‘I didn’t have a single crash during the testing of this board.’ is also worthless. What has testing the motherboard with a single setup proven? Not a thing in these two categories. Of course, if I DO run into problems, I will report them, but to claim a motherboard 100% stable because Windows didn’t puke the one installation I performed is just setting myself up. To properly test stability, I would need every brand of video card, hard drive, PCI device, memory and software, and those are just resources that I, or any web reviewer, have.
Sorry for the rant! Here are the test system setups:
| CPU | AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz (133 MHz Bus) |
| Memory |
1 x 256MB Corsair PC150 SDRAM |
| Hard Drive | 20.5GB 7200 RPM Western Digital EIDE |
| Video Card | Visiontek GeForce 3 |
| Video Drivers | Detonator 12.60 |
| Operating System | Windows 98 SE |
Tests:
Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark
