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Good, bad, or indifferent. Whatever your thoughts and/or feelings may be of the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset, the fact remains that it has given a strong boost of support to Intel's newer range of processors.
85% Rating: 
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Iwill VD133Pro |
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Installation
As with any other VIA Apollo Pro
133A motherboard on the market, all that was required was an install of the
4-in-1 driver under Windows 98 and a brief process to verify that the drivers
have been properly installed. Physical installation into a cabinet was no
different from what one should expect. The only two things that need to be
considered (for basic users) is to disable / enable the AC97 audio CODEC (if
need be) as well as the RAID subsystem.
For those of you that may require
running your system WITHOUT RAID support, it is recommended that you disable
RAID functionality via jumpers. If nothing else, you will certainly shed a few
seconds of boot time as a RAID options menu does appear after POSTing when RAID
is enabled.
We had the pleasure of reviewing Iwill's SIDE-RAID66
controller card. The driver setup and configuration of RAID in the VD133Pro is
no different. The following is taken from the SIDE-RAID66 review...
Installation was very simple. Simply plug in the board and Windows 98 prompts
you to feed in the drivers. In addition, the card has its own BIOS whose screen
pops up just before booting into your operating system. Drivers for Windows NT,
Windows 98 and Windows 2000 do come along with the unit. Within the BIOS are a
number of options to select depending on whether your want striping, mirroring
or both. Setup from this screen is a breeze. Just choose what you want and the
BIOS does everything for you.
RAID
SCSI based RAID has
had several years to evolve into what it has currently become. IDE RAID can be
considered to be an extremely new concept targeted to the lower end of the
market and focuses on bringing the fruits of RAID's concepts to the common
user... without the costs which are commonly involved. Though the technology is
so new, we are certainly pleased to see it implemented so well.
Iwill's
VD133Pro RAID solution is based upon Highpoint's HPT368 which is capable of
RAID 0, RAID 1 as well as RAID 0+1 operation.
The reason IDE RAID (as well
as integrating it onto mainboards) is so attractive is primarily due to the fact
that those who cannot afford SCSI based solutions, the concept of redundancy is
now within reach. No longer must one spend lots of money to own a real time data
backup solution. Coupled with mirroring, IDE RAID present on the VD133Pro also
supports striping which greatly enhances data throughput performance while using
2 hard disk drives.
Test Bed Setup
In giving our
results obtained from benchmarking, we have also added some performance figures
of the IDE RAID subsystem as well. Below is a disclosure of the hardware used in
our tests.
- Celeron 400 CPU
- Iwill VD133Pro Motherboard
- Soltek
67KV Motherboard
- Iwill SIDE-RAID66 card
- 128MB PC100 SDRAM
- 2 x
8.4GB Seagate U8 Hard disk
- Windows 98 (standard)
- Windows NT 4.0
Server
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