Of course, the most important feature of the KA266-R is its DDR SDRAM support. The board supports both DDR200 and DDR266 memory, also known as PC1600 and PC2100 memory. We can thank a marketing bozo somewhere (not at ALi or Iwill) for coining those new memory names. In order to use DDR266 memory, you must have a 266MHz FSB AMD processor. We expect AMD will ship 266MHz FSB Athlons when the motherboards are ready. Until then, there would be no demand.

We were not able to run or post our own benchmarks with the test board we had. However, we were able to watch a continuous demo running on the Iwill board at the recent Microprocessor Forum in San Jose. Overall performance appeared excellent. Though we cannot give exact numbers, we estimate that, with the final product, you will see about 10% better performance over the KT133 chipset with the KA266-R and other ALiMAGiK 1 chipset based boards. ALi and Iwill still have some distance to cover before shipping, but seeing as they had a demo machine running ZD's 3DWinBench on a continuous loop for hours on end, they do not have too far to go. Iwill has done extremely well with first silicon on a first revision board.

That's right, we said first silicon and first version of the board. In addition, AGP appeared to be working well on the demo system. Judging from this information, ALi may actually be able to ship before AMD, which would mean that Iwill could have the first consumer DDR chipset on the market. That would be a coup for both ALi and Iwill.

It looks like VIA will be late into the DDR arena, which means that ALi and AMD may take back a large portion of the K7 market. Things are looking good for both ALi and Iwill. We hope to revisit Iwill's KA266-R in later revisions in order to bring you more information on the performance benefits of DDR memory as well as the new DDR chipsets coming to the market. We will definitely post more when we get more information so be sure to check back.

Jon Simon
Assistant Editor