Wednesday, June 14, 2000

Introduction

When Soyo announced that its SY-6VBA+ IV motherboard would feature an integrated RAID system, alot of people got excited, only to see the featured axed before the product hit the shelves. Now, however, the first motherboard with a truly integrated RAID system has hit the market, this time from Iwill, in the guise of the VD133 Pro RAID. Not only is this the first non-SCSI RAID Pentium motherboard to see the light of day, but the VD133 Pro RAID has plenty of other features to delight, and entertain its audience. This release is definitely a moment to be remembered, so let's give it an analysis to match.

The features

The Iwill VD133 Pro RAID is a Socket 370 board based on the Via Apollo Pro133A chipset supporting Celeron & Coppermine FC-PGA processors.

Expansion of this board is assured by 5 PCI slots, single AGP slot, and AMR slot. Do note that the VD133 Pro RAID has lost an ISA slot since its first incarnation as the VD133. On the other hand, it has gained an AMR slot that the former never had. Finally, there are also 3 168-pin DIMM slots that can support upto 1.5GB of PC100, or PC133 memory.

Two disk controllers can be found on the VD133 Pro RAID: the IDE disk controller, and the RAID controller that has got us all excited. Thus, a grand total of 8 IDE drives can be supported; 4 on the IDE controller, and 4 more hooked up to the RAID controller. From a flexibility standpoint, the VD133 Pro RAID is certainly on the right track...

To configure the VD133 Pro RAID, there involves very little monkeying with jumpers. There is, of course, the CMOS jumper, and jumper JP6 for setting the "start-up from the mouse/keyboard" function. There is also jumper JP10, that allows the processor's VIO voltage to be increased by 5% or 10%, jumper JP13 for activating/deactivating the integrated AC"97 sound-card, and JP70 for activating/deactivating the RAID controller. Other functions are configured from within the BIOS menu labeled "Iwill Smart Settings". For example, in this menu, there are options for setting the processor bus speed, and the clock multiplier. There is also a function within the "Chipset Features Setup" menu that allows the memory bus frequency to be set 33MHz higher or lower than that of the main bus.

Available FSB settings 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.

Not documented in some editions of the users manual, including the one that I had with the unit that I received for reviewing, is a Vcore adjustment labelled JP

Next: Additional features.