Tuesday, March 19, 2002

XP333-R Review -- 10:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

HardOCP posted a review of the IWill XP333-R motherboard, the same mobo powering my new box (although I have the non-RAID version). It isn't the most glowing review in the world, mainly because they had a couple of boards that were DOA and they couldn't automatically overclock to a 166Mhz FSB like the board's name implies. The main problem is that IWill's marketing people should be beaten about the head.

Here's my personal experience with the board. 99% of the problems I had were fixed by flashing to the latest (January 17) BIOS and not running the ALi hardware monitor. Since then, it's been basically rock-solid. I do a lot of gaming on this box, but it is also my work box. If it doesn't function, I can't get my work done. I've been pleased with the lack of "issues" I've had with it either in Win98 or in Linux. The BIOS checksum error I had right after I got it (story) is not motherboard-specific. From what I've read on the newsgroups, just about every type of Award BIOS mobo has faced that problem at one time or another.

I'm not interested in overclocking (overclocking an Athlon XP 1800+ seems like overkill to me). The main reasons I got this board was to avoid problems with the VIA chipsets and because ALi actually goes out of their way to support Linux.

News for 03/19/2002

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).