ByteEnable looks at the new Iwill DH800 Dual Pentium 4 Xeon Workstation motherboard. This motherboard picks up where Asus left off.


Iwill
DH800
Review


The Dual Pentium III workstation that I use is getting a little rusty. Unreal Tournament 2004 brings it to its knees. I've been eyeballing the Asus PC-DL Deluxe for some time now. However, the Asus has problems with over-clocking. Besides being close to a year old, the BIOS does not lock the I/O bus clocks. As you increase the FSB of the CPU, the AGP, PCI and memory clocks increase also, causing video adapters and memory dimm's to be run out spec, and your system to crash. This issue has kept me at bay. This Iwill board uses the same chipset as the Asus. Iwill has picked up where Asus has left off and turned this motherboard into a tweakers motherboard.

I was sorta hesitant to use Iwill again. The current system I have is an Iwill DVD266-rn (dual Pentium III). Aside from the VIA PCI chipset flaws, NVIDIA driver issues and an outdated BIOS when the board shipped, this old DVD266-rn I have has been fairly stable (VIA Apollo Pro266T chipset). I manually patched my BIOS to fix the PCI issues using MODBIN. While I was at it, I went ahead and fixed the memory register timing too. Iwill never issued a new a BIOS to address these issue's. The FSB bus clock stepping never worked either. Iwill claimed that you could step the CPU clock frequency in 1 MHz increments. However, only 66, 100 and 133 MHz are the only bootable frequencies, any deviation yields a no boot, and you have to reset CMOS to restore your system. All the hardware websites exclaimed the virtues of this mobo. When I contacted them on the issue's I was experiencing, all I received was deafening silence. Enough of the history lesson.

Quick Specs

• Dual Intel Xeon processors 533/800 MHz FSB (604 Socket)
• Intel 875P + 6300ESB (HR)
• Dual Channel DDR 400 with ECC up to 4GB
• AGP Pro/8X
• PCI-X 64/66
• Intel CSA Gigabit LAN up to 266MB/s
• TI IEEE-1394
• 2 SATA w/ Adaptec HOST RAID support RAID 1
• AMI BIOS

Test Configuration

• Iwill DH800 Workstation Motherboard
• Two Intel Pentium 4 Xeon @ 2.66 GHz/533 MHz
• Two sticks of DDR400 Ram (333 Timing, 1GB Total Ram)
• BFG OC NVIDIA 5900XT 128MB Video Adapter
• Maxtor SATA 7200RPM 160GB Drive
• LG 8X DVD-/+RW/RAM/CD-RW Drive
• Antec TRUE550EPS12V Power Supply
• Fedora Core 2 with kernel 2.6.7 from kernel.org [1]

BIOS
This is a modern BIOS and looks very professional. Iwill even has a pulsating, blue top border in the setup screens. Its got all the standard features plus some. The Linux kernel never complained either. I was impressed. I expected a 2001 year bios that had been hacked and patched to death. So Iwill spent some money and upgraded their BIOS code!

All you hard core techies want to know if you can over-clock? Yeap. Its got all the BIOS options that you need to tweak your system. The advanced BIOS settings are not listed in the manual by the way. I have also included some screen shots. This is the overview:

• Programmable CPU Multiplier
• Programmable FSB Frequency in 1 MHz steppings
• Programmable CPU and DRAM voltage
• Programmable DRAM Timing
• Programmable I/O Clocks (AGP,PCI.MEMORY)

I did notice a problem with the BIOS while over-clocking. On a cold boot, the system will hang when over-clocked. The solution is to press the reset button and boot will occur normally. I suspect this is a cold boot conflict with the BIOS while reprogramming the necessary registers to over-clock. Reboots from the BIOS setup screen or any other reboots via software never resulted in a hang, only emerging from a cold boot.

Performance

Unfortunately, Linux has no easy method of running benchmarks. Windows has had years of benchmark development. I even thought of running some Windows benchmarks using Wine just to see if I could. Most Linux benchmarks are shell based and are outdated by years. I ran UnixBench, which is the old Byte Magazine Benchmarks, and the results were disappointing. I also ran LMBench, which again is old, with nothing to report. Someone could spend months analyzing and improving these benchmarks. The only modern benchmark that I could come up with was Unreal Tournament 2004. So here are the numbers:

IWILL DH800
UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-03-03_02.42]
x86 Linux
GenuineIntel Unknown processor @ 2565 MHz
GeForce FX 5900XT/AGP/SSE2

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

22.416807 / 68.334816 / 151.204193 fps rand[1881639875]
Score = 65.608589

IWILL DVD266-rn
UT2004 Build UT2004_Build_[2004-03-03_02.42]
x86 Linux
GenuineIntel PentiumPro-class processor @ 1079 MHz
GeForce FX 5700 Ultra/AGP/SSE

dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini -exec=../Benchmark/Stuff/botmatchexec.txt

14.891765 / 32.424778 / 74.525101 fps rand[1881639875]
Score = 32.442440

Of course, the Pentium 4 smokes the Pentium III by 100%. If anyone knows of any Linux benchmark apps that are useful for modern hardware, please let me know.

Build Checklist

• The motherboard size (PCB) is 12"x10.5". This is slightly bigger than a standard ATX. Insure that your case can handle this size of motherboard.
• The AGP slot is 1.5V only.
• There are no headers for USB front panel wiring. The 1394 header is not documented in the manual so its rather impossible to rewire correctly for front panel wiring.
• The manual states to not attach one corner of the heatsink backplane down to the chassis (case). IMHO, this is an error. I'm no mechanical engineer, but I followed the directions in the manual and noticed lots of play when I attached the retail heat sinks. I disassembled the system and installed a screw where Iwill stated not too. The play is gone and the processor's are running fine.

Wrap UP

I installed SUSE 9.1 Pro, Mandrake 10 Official and Fedora Core 2 without any problems. Every peice of hardware was detected and a driver loaded. If you are using a SATA drive, you will need to setup your BIOS for the SATA/IDE as shown here:


This motherboard makes for a nice upgrade. Remember to refer to the "Build Checklist" when upgrading. The only drawbacks are the one BIOS problem documented earlier, and a max of 4GB of ram. You can find this motherboard at Iwill here [2].