VIA KT266A Motherboard Roundup - January 2002

Overclocking the Iwill XP333-R

With the XP333-R, you need to overclock the system in order to unleash its true power. But how much speed do you gain by running the system at 166MHz?

In order to fully demonstrate the overclocking capabilities of the Iwill XP333-R, we obtained several scores using different FSB and memory bus speeds. Moreover, we also put in the ABIT KR7-RAID in for comparison as well. For the XP333-R, we used the latest BIOS, dated 1/10/2002, which enables you to run the memory and CPU speeds asynchronously. Therefore we were able to keep the CPU running at 133MHz but boost up the memory to 166MHz. This guaranteed that we were not overclocking the CPU at all.

For the test setup, we used an unlocked AMD AthlonXP 1800+, but we constantly set the multiplier to 8. This ensured that we had enough headroom for overclocking. The remaining of the test setup remains the same.

Here we can see how much overclocking on the XP333-R can do for you. By overclocking both the FSB and the memory bus to 166MHz, we obtained quite a boost in performance compared to both running at 133MHz. The difference could be as much as 10% in SYSMark 2000. At 133/133 settings, both the XP333-R and the KR7-RAID performed almost identical to each other, with no one board edging out the other by more than 2.5%.

However, things become interesting when running the FSB and memory bus asynchronously on the XP333-R. We expected the scores of 133/166 to be between 133/133 and 166/166, but reality shows that the performance is lower than that of 133/133 by around 3%. This could be due to the immaturity of the BIOS. Hopefully Iwill will fix the problem soon to bring back up the performance for 133/166 settings.

Also, in the 133/100 case for the ABIT KR7-RAID, the performance hit for running the memory at 100MHz was around 10%. Therefore, although this setting will allow you to raise the FSB higher, but you have to take the memory performance hit as well.

In short, if you decide to go for the Iwill XP333-R, you should go for the 166/166 setting for optimal performance. Running it at 133/133 results in pretty much the same speed as a KT266 system. Before Iwill releases another BIOS, you should avoid the 133/166 setting which can actually slow down the system.