Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Introduction

Iwill hasn't been very active in the motherboard market of late. They have recently released a few large-format mobos -- such as a dual-AMD model, and an i850 board with support for PC1066 RDRAM -- but nothing that could be considered a conventional board. Instead, most of their recent efforts have been focused on computer connoisseurs with more demanding tastes than the average user.

Now though, Iwill has taken a step in a different direction by releasing two new boards where one based on the KT400 and the other on an i845G chipset. Today, we'll be reviewing the Iwill P4GS, which is designed around the Intel I845G.

The Iwill P4GS supports both DDR333 memory, and ATA133 drives (via its integrated RAID controller), as well as numerous other features. These include not only a six-channel Realtek ALC 650 sound-card, but also a 10/100Base-T Ethernet network card based on the RTL 8100B microchip.

The P4GS also comes complete with a two-channel RAID 0+1 card that supports SATA (Serial ATA) drives.

Finally, thanks to the "G" in the i845G chipset, the P4GS can also boast of an integrated graphics card.

With all that said then, let's say we take a closer look.

The F1 Panel

Much like Abit's "Max" series of motherboards, the Iwill P4GS supports the addition of a multimedia breakout-box named F1 Panel. The box comes complete with a variety of magnetic card readers, USB 2.0 ports, a microphone jack, and a headphone jack. The F1 Panel also permits users to load "Memory Stick" (MS), "Compact Flash" (1 and 2), and "Secure Digital" (SD) cards onto their systems. Each type of card is loaded promptly by Windows, and is recognized as a removable storage media. The principal difference between to Iwill's box and Abit's, is that Iwill's "F1 Panel" does not come with a remote control, or Firewire ports. On the other hand, the "F1 Panel" is much less expensive than Abit's "Media XP".

Configuration

The Iwill P4GS's design is a Jumperless affair; not a single on-board jumper or Dip switch relates to the configuration of the CPU. In short, as with most modern boards, most settings are made from within the BIOS.

Once there, users will be most attracted to the "Frequency/Voltage Control" menu, which allows the FSB frequency to be set to a value ranging from 133Mhz to 165Mhz in 1MHz steps.

Unfortunately, there are no BIOS options for adjusting the AGP or Vcore voltages, though the jumpers labeled "JDIMMVOLT1" do allos the DDR voltage to be set to between 2.5v and 2.9v in steps of 0.1v.

Finally, Iwill also provides users with a number of options regarding the P4GS's memory settings. The most important of these is the option to set the asynchronous memory-bus speed to that of DDR200, DDR266, or DDR333 memory. It is also possible to manually adjust CAS, and RAS-to-CAS latency.

Please note, though, that the P4GS comes with only two memory slots, which does restrict the amount of latitude that users have.

Next: Technical details.

Iwill P4GS