Wednesday, May 03, 2000

Introduction

At first glance, the VD133 Gold from Iwill has very little in common with the first generation VD133. In fact, the many new features that have been added, and a totally new design, separate the VD133 Gold from its predecessor. With a design that's based around the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset, the VD133 Gold manages to support 4X AGP, ATA66 drives, and PC133 memory. Even better, the VD133 Gold also supports an onboard Fast SCSI drives that has been imbedded directly into its circuitry. Now, if all that has managed to pique your interest, please feel free to follow along while we take you on a detailed exploration of this board.

The features

The VD133 Gold is expandable via its 4 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, and single AGP port. If you remember its predecessor - the VD133 - you'll then realize that the VD133 Gold has lost 1 PCI, and 1 ISA slot since its last incarnation. On the other hand, the new kid on the block does sport a new AMR slot, from which its ancestor did not benefit. Finally, the VD133 Gold's has 3 on-board 168-pin DIMM sockets will allow for upto 768MB of memory to be installed. As for the memory itself, both PC100, and PC133 memory-types are supported, and may be installed.

As to the configuration of the VD133 Gold, one finds a gambit of jumpers on the board, for setting the main bus frequency, the CPU's core voltage, and the CPU's Vio voltage. All these options - except for the core voltage - can also be set from within the comfort of the BIOS, under the "Iwill Smart Settings" menu. Finally, under the "Chipset Features Setup" menu, it is possible to set the operating frequency of the memory bus to a setting 33MHz higher, or lower than that of the main bus. So, for example, it becomes possible to set the main bus to 133MHz, subtract 33MHz, and apply the result as the resulting memory bus frequency of 100Mhz thus allowing the user to install PC100 memory in conjunction with a 133MHz FSB.

As was mentioned earlier, it is also quite possible to adjust the processor's core voltage. This is accomplished by setting jumper JP9, with possible settings being: _.15%, +.5, +1.5% and +7.8%. Another jumper, labeled J10, can also be used to adjust the processor's Vio voltage to a setting of 5% or increase it by +10%, or to leave the exact setting to be automatically determined by the system.

Available bus frequencies, include: 66Mhz, 68Mhz, 75Mhz, 80Mhz, 83Mhz, 90Mhz, 95Mhz, 100Mhz, 103Mhz, 105Mhz, 110Mhz, 112Mhz, 115Mhz, 124Mhz, 130Mhz, 133Mhz, 135Mhz, 138Mhz, 140Mhz, 144Mhz, 150Mhz, 155Mhz, 160Mhz, and 166Mhz, with clock multipliers of between 2X and 8X, in steps of .5X.

Next: Additional features.