Epox 83KA+ -vs- iWill XP333-R

Quote:

Originally posted by AMD_Man

I find it odd that Asus, Abit, and Iwill have all had problems. The only common factor I can see is the VIA chipset. I hate to say it but the only motherboard that didn't cause any problems was the MSI 850 Pro5 that my friend got for his P4 1.7GHz.

Everyone mainboard manufacturer has problems. For example, we had to RMA quite a few ASUS CUSL2 boards. Now other people here might have had no problems with CUSL2 boards but would have had to RMA quite a large percentage of, say 8KHA+ boards, which I have never had a problem with.

It's not odd, it's made in Taiwan. ;)

This post has no discrimination against anyone Taiwanese, if you were offended, please accept my humblest apologies.

Quote:

Originally posted by Mandorallen of Molynnr

Everyone mainboard manufacturer has problems. For example, we had to RMA quite a few ASUS CUSL2 boards. Now other people here might have had no problems with CUSL2 boards but would have had to RMA quite a large percentage of, say 8KHA+ boards, which I have never had a problem with.

It's not odd, it's made in Taiwan. ;)

This post has no discrimination against anyone Taiwanese, if you were offended, please accept my humblest apologies.

True, true, but how does all this stuff get past quality control?

Quote:

Originally posted by AMD_Man

True, true, but how does all this stuff get past quality control?

There's quality control? ;)

Well, I don't know how far quality control goes. If it posts once, it's working fine? It might die later, or never turn on again.

There has also been some speculation that shipping might drop the stuff...or something like that. I remember some guy who worked for a courier service kicking a box with a fragile sticker and "this way up" on it because it never said please.

heh, i dont know about you guys, but the real world performance of this board is on par with that of my friends kt333, i dont notice a difference, now if i was number crunching, or something along them lines i prolly would, but i aint and when i am gaming/benchmarking the only thing i am lacking in is memory performance, not that i care, but honest truth all this sticking up for iwill, go with the Epox board, i was thinking of getting one based purely on its features... looks like it has that part in the bag :)

Quote:

Originally posted by Mandorallen of Molynnr

There's quality control? ;)

Well, I don't know how far quality control goes. If it posts once, it's working fine? It might die later, or never turn on again.

There has also been some speculation that shipping might drop the stuff...or something like that. I remember some guy who worked for a courier service kicking a box with a fragile sticker and "this way up" on it because it never said please.

Heh, yeah. I've seen a lot of boxes with smushed corners and suspiciously foot sized holes/dents.

But on-topic...

xp333 vs kt333, I think the issue is what you get with your OC, performance wise. Back in dec-jan, when we were looking at this mobo the performance wasn't compelling vs kt266a running 33MHz slower. Moreover, people who had motherboards with earlier steppings of the ALi Magic 1 were reluctant to recommend it. In fact, I don't recall (outside of this thread) anyone ever asserting the ealier (a7a266 and ka266) ALi based mobos were more stable or bug free compaired to Via. Now, 5 months later, nobody talks about it because they didn't go the guinea pig route and bought something else. As is the norm, reviewers haven't gone back to look at the board again, but I doubt much has changed.

The latest review of the board I can recall was here...

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/mainboards/iwill/xp333r/

Their summary (March, some months after the release of the board) was preluded with this attempt at running at 333...
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"Our next set of benchmarks did not go as well, with the system locking up repeatedly while trying to run SysMark 2001. Content Creation would BSOD the machine or randomly crash back to the desktop. Quake III hard locked the system at the settings menu with a continually looping sound.

We set the BIOS to "failsafe", which loads the most scaled back settings, but the problems still occurred. Obviously, this was making it impossible to get any real benchmarks done with this motherboard while running at 166MHz FSB. Nothing we tried could get this board to run stable at 166MHz FSB.

A quick check revealed that the system would still run Sisoft Sandra and CPUID, but nothing else without crashing. This only reinforced our belief in the importance of running a full suite of benchmarks during a motherboard review, and not just a few rounds of Sisoft Sandra and CPUID.

We used several different BIOS revisions, as well as a BETA "Evaluation" BIOS during testing to no avail.

Something else that was rather odd was that any attempt to set the CPU/FSB divider to the 1/5 or 1/6 setting manually resulted in the system hard locking. The only way to get the system to run again was to reset the CMOS. Setting the divider to the "Auto" setting, the system would default to the 1/5 divider when running at 166MHz FSB. It's strange that it was capable of using the 1/5 divider on "Auto", but not when it was selected manually.

Problems

Obviously, with a motherboard that is sporting the "333" branding, you would certainly expect it to at least run at its advertised speed. After all, what sense would it make to add the "333" to the name if it's unable to run at that speed. So, to say we were a little disappointed would be an understatement.

Another very real issue with the IWill XP333R was this:

This motherboard review had to be among the most difficult to ever finish, and not because of the obvious reasons. Over the course of this review, we went through no less than four separate motherboards attempting to finish this review. More than one board arrived D.O.A. (dead on arrival) and the boards that DID arrive in working order had a tremendous amount of problems. Four boards later, we were finally able to get a board that could finish a review.

Now, had all the boards been tested in one location, one might give Iwill the benefit of the doubt by playing devil's advocate and say "Maybe [H]ardOCP has some testing methodology or hardware setup that is killing these boards". While we certainly have killed our fair share of hardware, the fact that two motherboards were shipped to Kyle (one DOA and one non-functional) and two were shipped directly to me (one DOA and the final review candidate), you can safely assume where the issues with this board may lie. While I cannot tell you exactly where or why these boards got screwed up, I can say that it is extremely frustrating. . .to say the least.

We waited until now to mention this to keep from unfairly slanting your view of this motherboard, hoping to give you an objective look at the XP333R. But this is information that has to be passed on to you, the end user, to help you make an informed decision when considering the platform you plan to base your system around."

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Personaly, I don't see the allure to spending more money for the best memory if the system isn't going to perform much/any better than a KT266A/KT333 running at a stable (if lower) freq on cheaper DIMMs. If all that mattered was frequency, I'd be running a P4. However if a mobo allows a high fsb oc, allows you to run at that speed without worrying about twitchy drives and data corruption (pci deviders). Then it's not all bad, as long as it works. But that doesn't make it an overclocking king or even a prince.