KK266 Series Appreciation Thread

[TooMuchCoffeeMan]

I was browsing AMDMB the other day and came across this thread (http://www.amdmb.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=126865).
Its all about having a good reason to upgrade for me, and for the performance gains vs money spent I have not yet been tempted.
I have had over a year out of this one so far and will be waiting on the hammer to come out before I think about parting with it.
A few of the guys in the above thread mention how good the KK266 was for its time and I agree, they are one of the most tweakable SDRAM boards and can achieve some really high front side bus speeds.
Paired with high performance ram, these boards can run really fast reliably.

Once you learn a few tricks, they can be a really stable high performance platform, at least thats been my experience.

I know there are a few KK266/KK266+/-R owners here at ocnz, were you happy with it during the time you had it ?

[Hans]

Yeah, I am very happy with my old KK-266-R. It's one of the fastest (from bench) and the most stable board I've came across.

I hardly had any crashes during the period I had it. It's better than my old Abit KT7.

There is one minor issue, it's raid DOS performance sux big time. The HD's read & write is so damn slow during warm reboot and only in warm reboot. Iwill never seem to fix that. It's 5V rail varies quite a bit if you have a high power GFX card. But other than these, it's a great board.

[KingJackal]

My KK266+ r0><0red big time. The audio on my board SUCKED ( compared to my Gametheatre XP - maybe it's just what I'm used to, but it crackled a lot ), and it took a lot longer to get going than my KT7A, but once it was going, ooooo yeah.... :p

164MHz fsb, RAM @ 2-2-2-5. Would have done that all day everyday if my TV-Tuner and the NIC I had at the time hadn't hated the PCI bus so much up there.

VERY nice boards. Cheetor had a KK266-R. His could do 166MHz fsb no problems.

Kinda funny though - in both cases they were stable as at that speed, but wouldn't even post 1MHz higher :eek: :confused:

Still, I was sad to see that board go - it really wasn't much slower @ 164MHz than a PC2100 system.
*sighs*

[Hans]

Anyone remember this??

http://www.radiativenz.com/reviews/abitkg7/index3.shtml

lol @ relatively high FSB vs DDR at the early days.

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by Hans
Anyone remember this??

http://www.radiativenz.com/reviews/abitkg7/index3.shtml

lol @ relatively high FSB vs DDR at the early days.

Lol - I remember that two :D

Heh, do you remember the odd stick of exotic PC-180 SDR SD-RAM floating around? I think Mushkin made them. And the jocks with super-cooled SDR systems over the 170-180MHz fsb mark? LOL - they still totally 0wn3d all the DDR boys when it first came out, cos the DDR couldn't do much past 150, hehehehee :D

[Hans]

Yeah..

there was the times of

Abit KT7A Golden Revision - 180+ MHz operation

Tomicom BGA ram - 166 MHz Cas 2 or 180+ MHz Cas 3.

etc.

[shag]

Yep, like u said Hans. I'll be keeping mine for a while yet. It's doing the job just fine for now and still will for the rest of the year and then some :cool:

Unlike u guys though I haven't ramped up my FSB. I have too many cards in there that might have issues with me doing that:rolleyes:

Having the raid and plenty of ram help to keep it up to speed though. And it'll still whip the ass off yer bog standard ddr platform in certian resource hungry apps cause of those 2 things mentioned above :p

[Agent 86]

I was always a big fan of the KK266. So impressed with it I talked 4 guys in my clan into getting the same board. Another thing that swayed me towards Iwill at the time was they were the young underdogs competing against the might of Abit and the devil known as Asus.

How many ppl had heard of Iwill before the KK266, anyone? Ofcourse the awesome reviews the board was getting around the world made the decision a little easier. Btw any of you guys running an XP on the KK266 coz I heard it was a little buggy.

[ScREWtop]

Death is running XP1800 on a KK266, and Jamoost is running Athlon 1.4 on a KK266.

[Viper_NZ]

XP's have a timing problem with the KK266. Which is what caused me to upgrade my KK266 to an A7N266-C.. Very nice upgrade.

The Iwill rocked tho. I had no problems with it at all other than the Athlon XP, worked completely solid with Duron and Athlon (tbird).

Iwill are readying a KT400 based board. Which I for one will be keeping a very close eye on. It's about time they stopped relying on that ALi s**t

[hessian]

Originally posted by Viper_NZ
XP's have a timing problem with the KK266. Which is what caused me to upgrade my KK266 to an A7N266-C..

Can you please elaborate on this XP timing issue ?

[ScREWtop]

Originally posted by Viper_NZ
XP's have a timing problem with the KK266. Which is what caused me to upgrade my KK266 to an A7N266-C.. Very nice upgrade.

The Iwill rocked tho. I had no problems with it at all other than the Athlon XP, worked completely solid with Duron and Athlon (tbird).

Iwill are readying a KT400 based board. Which I for one will be keeping a very close eye on. It's about time they stopped relying on that ALi s**t

Iwill is not doing the KT400.

[Hans]

Not doing KT-400 MB???

Have you seen the board yet?


http://www.anandtech.com/html/showimage.cfm?u=http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/shows/computex/2002/day1/part2/iWill_KT400_big.jpg

Page 5 of this, http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1631

This as well,

http://www.amdmb.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=130247

[ScREWtop]

Nope, not doing anymore AMD. MPX2 is the last AMD board from Iwill. Moving towards Intel now.