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The Iwill
P4R533-N is a well planned out and designed board.
Let's give you a closer look at the goods.
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Installation / Setup with the P4R533-N |
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A great layout |
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Iwill
certainly wasn't interested in skimping at the board level
with the P4R533-N. They've incorporated a nice large
heat sink on the i850E Northbridge chip. This is
definitely something that is put to good use with the i850E
and not just window dressing. Every i850 or i850E
board we've had here in the HH Lab, exhibited a fair amount
of heat under load, at the Northbridge chip. Also,
Iwill's placement of the ATX power connector is perfect, at
the edge of the board allowing cabling to be tucked away and
not infringe on airflow around the CPU Cooler.
Iwill's
choice of integrated audio technology was also top notch.
A long time HotHardware favorite, the P4R533-N incorporates
a C-Media 6 Channel Audio chip with full Direct Sound, A3D
and EAX support with 3D positional audio effects.
There is also a Realtek 10/100 Ethernet controller on the
board and an RJ45 jack on it's I/O back-plate.
What was a
bit of a disappointment, was the lack of a RAID controller
on this board. We've become accustomed to integrated
Highpoint or Promise ATA100 or ATA133 RAID controllers on
these types of high end boards. However, what is more
of a rarity is integrated Ethernet. So, where the absence of
RAID is a mark against the P4R533-N, integrated LAN
functionality balances things out in our book.
Regardless, having both of these functions would be
perfection. Finally, one more downside was that,
although the P4R533-N has a connector for a smart card
reader, the board does not include any reader hardware to
take advantage of that port. Again, not a big item but
with boards like
the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon on the market, there is stiff
competition out there with more bells and whistles.
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BIOS
Setup of the P4R533-N |
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Configurable but a
little short on options |
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Once again,
Iwill does a good job of giving the end user the ability to
tweak things a bit in their BIOS. We would say they've
done a "good" job but not great with the P4R533-N.
There are a fair number of selectable FSB speeds and AGP/PCI
divisors, all the way up to 160MHz and beyond.
However, selectable FSB speeds in increments of 1MHz as well
as selectable AGP and PCI divisors, have become fairly
commonplace in high end boards from other manufacturers.
Not the case the with P4R533-N.
On the up side however,
Northwood users are treated to voltage settings up to 1.85V
with this board. Often times, we've encounter more
stable overclocks with settings between 1.75 and 1.85V on
the new Northwoods. Speaking of which, let's show you
how the P4R533-N from Iwill stood up to our overclocking
tests.
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Overclocking
the
Iwill
P4R533-N
Motherboard |
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When you just can't
get enough blinding speed |
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What's not
to love about overclocking. Most folks do it just for
bragging rights, while others on a budget opt to buy less
expensive hardware, such as the 1.6GHz Northwood Pentium 4
and push it to it's limits for maximum value. We have
the luxury of using the CPU of our choice here at
HotHardware, so we plugged in a 533MHz bus Pentium 4 2.4GHz
Northwood and let it rip with our
Kingston PC1066 memory. Here are the results.
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Sandra CPU 2610MHz
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Sandra MM 2610MHz
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Sandra Memory 1160MHz
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We were satisfied with the
P4R533-N's ability to overclock. Taking a look at the
Sandra Memory scores, it is obvious to see that although
overclocked DDR SDRAM certainly holds its own, PC1066 RDRAM
still rules the roost when overclocked. We'll have to
see how the tables turn, if at all, when Intel brings forth
Dual Channel DDR to the P4. As far as overclocking
goes for the P4R533-N, although it can perform quite
handily, we've had this particular CPU up to 150MHz FSB for
a total of 2.7GHz and 1200MHz RDRAM speed, on other boards.
More
Sandra 2002, Winstones, Comanche 4 and 3DMark
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