Motherboard: Iwill XP333-R Review :: Installation

I was given two motherboards to work with for this review the first was the older model XP333 the second the newer 2.1 version that supposedly had all the bugs worked out of it and had some minor performance gains over the originally 2.0 released product. Everyone is raving about the overclocking features of this motherboard all over the net and touting how well the FSB overclocking works. There are a few jumpers on the board but you can use them or the BIOS to attain your overclock settings the choice is yours to make. The jumpers all have easy access tabs for removing and moving them around to get the results you want.

I used the XP 1800+ plus for this review, which is not the most overclocker friendly CPU out there in CPU land today, but nonetheless one of AMD's best CPU's and one of the most commonly sold in the retail market. There are many options available for the user who wants to overclock their system. You get the usual Front-side bus, multiplier and V'core adjustment options. The FSB can be adjusted from 100MHz to 233MHz, which theoretically can be set to a FSB of 466MHz but this is not an accurate measurement to go by.

The CPU multiplier range is from 5X to 14X currently and I am told that a 15X setting is a just BIOS flash away. You can also change the V'core voltage from 1.125v to 1.85v in baby steps of 0.025v increments. In the newer 2.1 versions you are given the option of a flat 10% gain in the V'core settings that works well for the overclocker. Increasing the V'core voltage is used to increase stability in an overclocked CPU. Use this as a last option and should only be used for increased stability always try to overclock the CPU with the default V'core setting first and if it posts but will not go into Windows then increase the V'core.

Overclocking with the FSB can be a little confusing. When using a standard multiplier of 1/4, the PCI bus runs at 33 MHz; with a multiplier of 1/2, the AGP bus runs at 66 MHz. Those are the default values that all motherboards with a 133 MHz FSB follow. When you overclock by increasing the FSB, you are actually changing the PCI and AGP busses at the same time, which can cause stability problems. You have to take in mind that a FSB running at 170MHz with the standard dividers gives you a PCI bus running at 42.5MHz and an AGP bus running at 85MHz and this is where the bottleneck becomes apparent if your peripherals cannot run at these speeds.

The options available on the XP333 are geared toward overclocking and the PCI dividers can be set to 1/3, 1/4, 1/5 and 1/6.This can help a great deal when increasing the FSB for overclocking and can help eliminate some of the problems associated with motherboards that only offer the standard 1/4 PCI divider as an option. On this motherboard if you set the FSB to 170MHz you can then change the PCI divider to 1/5 that sets the AGP divider to 2/5 making your PCI speed 34MHZ and your AGP speed 68MHz which is much closer to the standard settings and should cause no operation problems for your inline cards.

For this set of tests I set the motherboard up using the standard setting for an XP1800+ CPU in a non-RAID environment and really did not mess with the overclocking very much in testing. I was able to get the board to 150Mhz via the BIOS settings but my CPU would not tolerate any increase past this point and was unstable even at that. The Nanya memory provided by my contact at Iwill Mr. Sherman Tang was only able to work up to 142MHz but when I switched to my Corsair PC2700/DDR333 memory I was able to clock the FSB up to 150MHz using the 10% Vcore gain that is in the BIOS mentioned earlier. Other than that the XP333-R was pretty easy to use and set up it has all the features that make for a quality overclockers board and is user friendly. Windows installation along with all the system and test software went without incident or fail.

Stability/Torture Testing

In this round I used 3Dmark 2001 in an endless loop for twenty-four hours and Prime 95 a well-known test for testing the stability of your system. Prime was run for over a day and the system encountered no problems during that time period. If you are not familiar with Prime 95 I can tell you what it does. The software uses mathematical calculations that search for Prime numbers which tests the system abilities at handling large scale calculations and pushing the PC to its limits while doing so. The system ran fine through all tests and was completely stable. No stability problems here.