BIOS
Iwill have traditionally placed an emphasis on allowing the user to heavily tweak and manipulate their motherboard's BIOS'. Let's have a look at the main configuration screen.
The general layout of the BIOS will be familiar to you if you've used recent ABIT, MSI, or Shuttle motherboards. Where it is non-standard, however, is in the level of Vcore that you can apply. 2v is bordering on the dangerous with a Northwood-based Pentium 4. Still, you have to applaud Iwills range of options. I didn't quite venture up to the 2v limit, as my air-cooling would have been dangerously compromised. It all seemed fine at 1.85v, though. You're allowed 1.175 - 2v in 0.025v increments. Memory voltage adjustment is also healthy at 2.5v - 2.9v in 0.1v increments. Iwill do have a warning screen if you enter values that are considered high. It will ask you whether you wish to proceed or not.
One aspect of the Intel DDR chipset that has been used to great effect by ABIT, in particular, is the locking of the sensitive AGP/PCI busses if you choose to overclock your CPU. Having 2v Vcore certainly gives you all the excuse you'll ever need. Iwill appear to have gone a step further in this respect. You can either set the PCI clock divider to fixed (at variable settings), or to the following:
It seems as if they have all the bases covered. The fixed divider can be set to either 66/33 (AGP/PCI), 75/37, or 88/44. I can't see the point of the latter.
Memory timing manipulation is exactly the same as ABIT's motherboards. You're even given the harsh 1.5 clock CAS latency option. The 845PE chipset supports DDR333 memory, we see the option present in BIOS.
This particular Iwill holds voltages extremely well. With moderate BIOS load and setting the Vcore to the default 1.525v (2.8GHz CPU), it leveled out at around 1.5v. Some motherboards tend to undervolt by as much as 0.1v. What's of a little concern, though, is the reported CPU temperature. As much as I'd like to think that it was 26c, I'd hazard that the actual temperature was closer to 40c.
The BIOS is strong in every respect. It controls the various on-board peripherals well, has bags of voltage adjustment that should appease all.
