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Quality and Setup of the Iwill P4HT-S |
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Still Red...Very, Very Red |
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There are quite a few
interesting things to talk about with regards to the
Iwill P4HT-S' layout, even on the underside of the
board! I guess we can thank James Chen for the
P4HT-S, our contact at Iwill let us know he was the
lead engineer behind this motherboard's design!
Also visible on the underside of the board are long,
thick stripes of solder beneath the voltage regulator
module (VRM), similar to the ones Abit installed on
the
TH7II-RAID. We're told these strips help
with heat dissipation, and EMI transmission, but we
have no conclusive way to test these claims. And
like the IT7 Max2 v2, the P4HT-S also has a unique
external I/O connector layout to accommodate the
integrated 6-Channel audio and 10/100 Ethernet.
Another feature worth
mentioning is the active cooler installed on the
Northbridge. At first glance it looks like any
other cooler, with the exception of the clear fan, but
power the system on the fan is illuminate by three
bright red LEDs. The lighted fan doesn't do
anything for overall performance, but we're sure all
of the case modders out there will like this
"feature"! :)
The Iwill P4HT-S is
equipped with a single AGP slot (with an excellent
locking mechanism), and five PCI slots, which should
offer plenty of expansion considering the slew of
components already integrated onto this motherboard.
A Promise 20275 RAID controller is integrated, but we
question the placement of the connectors. The
IDE RAID connectors are mounted in the middle of the
board, beneath the fifth PCI slot. With the
connectors situated in this location, unless your
drives are mounted at the bottom of your case, the IDE
cables will drape across the board. Another
thing we found "interesting" was the decision to place
a USB connector between the first and second PCI
slots. This may make it easier to connect
internal USB drives, but if there are any card mounted
in the PCI slots, it will be tough to get at this
connector. The header for USB connectors 5 & 6
is also mounted in a strange location, between the AGP
slot and first PCI slot. There was almost no
clearance between our Radeon 9700's cooler and this
header. If you've got a video card with a large
cooler, this USB header is basically useless.
There are a slew of large
capacitors mounted along the edge of the socket,
wrapping around one corner. The capacitors at
the corner are rather tall, and may get in the way of
any oversized coolers that extend past the socket.
The rest of the connectors and headers are mounted
parallel to the front edge of the board. The ATX
power connector is mounted between the two DIMM slots
and floppy connector, which was OK, but we would have
like to have seen it a little higher up on the board.
Oh, and did we mention the P4HT-S is Red? Very,
Very Red!
THE BIOS:
The Iwill
P4HT-S has a very complete version of the Phoenix /
Award v.6.0 BIOS, that populates 95% of the
motherboards that have passed through our labs.
Iwill gives users the ability to enable or disable all
of the on-board components. This BIOS also
offers a full set of options for tweaking the AGP slot
and memory for maximum performance. CAS settings
and other memory timings, as well as AGP aperture
values can all me manually assigned or set
automatically.
Under the "Iwill Smart
Setting" menu users will find all of options for
overclocking and disabling on-board components.
The overclockers out there will find the P4HT-S well
equipped. Users have the ability to set the FSB
to any speed between 100MHz and 250MHz, in 1MHz
increments. The PCI and AGP clocks can be fixed,
or set with any divider between 2 and 6. There
are also a wide range of voltages available for the
CPU and DDR memory. The VCore can be set to any
voltage from 1.175v and 2.0v, in .25v increments, and
the DDR voltage can be set to any voltage between 2.6v
and 2.9v, in .1v increments. About the only
thing missing is the ability to alter the AGP
voltage...
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