Back in October, we took an early look at an early version of Iwill's KA266-R, a motherboard using the ALi MAGiK 1 DDR chipset. At that point in time, we were not able to publish benchmarks. Today, things are different. We now have a full suite of benchmarks previewing this new DDR motherboard. Our version is not a final board, there is still a revision or two to go, but according to Iwill, the board and chipset should ship in late December.

While this is later than Iwill first expected, this should still be a bit earlier than the competition. According to several news stories floating around the web, motherboards using AMD's 760 chipset have been delayed due to power or noise problems. Micron is now shipping 200MHz DDR systems, but they had to send Gigabyte back to the drawing board to redo the 266MHz DDR version due to noise.

We have also heard rumors that motherboard makers are holding back, waiting for AMD's 266MHz FSB processors to ship. This does not make much sense to us on the retail/mail order level since, whether or not 266MHz FSB CPUs are available, whomever ships first to retail will still be able to sell boards to early adopters and enthusiasts. Also, we expect there are plenty of people who would happily go with a PC1600, 200MHz FSB CPU system.

However things turn out, today we are going to take a look at Iwill's KA266-R, WITH BENCHMARKS! Can Iwill's KA266-R stand up to AMD's 760 reference board? Does ALi's MAGiK 1 chipset stand up to the AMD 760 DDR chipset? Read on to find out!