Iwill first dazzled AnandTech with their contributions to the Super7 motherboard market, however very few people that are in the market for a motherboard know Iwill for their Slot-1 BX boards. The fact of the matter is that Iwill does happen to have a fairly extensive line of Slot-1 BX as well as dual processor BX motherboards, the Super7 XA100 and XA100Plus just happened to be the more publicized products due to the nature of their release. As with the rest of the motherboard manufacturers, Iwill is trying desperately to come away with some sort of memorable recognition for their latest BX board concoction. The "BX motherboard" has come a long way since the first 10 boards were originally rounded up on AnandTech, mainly driven by competition as well as the desire to offer alternatives to a seemingly ABIT-only overclockers market, let's take a look at what happens when Iwill takes their motherboard design and adds a few nifty features to top it off.

AnandTech Report Card Rating
84/B-

The Good

As a single processor BX board, the BD100Plus is doomed to a comparison to ABIT's BH6 and BX6 Revision 2, both of which offer jumperless configuration utilities as well as manual CPU voltage selection. In the minds of most tweakers and overclockers, if the board doesn't support those two features, it's not worthy of even the slightest glance. That was general consensus among Celeron 300A owners during the "golden age" of overclocking in 1998 when virtually all 300A's hit that wonderful 450MHz mark, sometimes with a little tweaking of the 2.0v core voltage. Since then, the ability to manually configure the core voltage of the Pentium II/III or Celeron CPU is not as important as the supply of overclockable 300A's has all but died out in supply, however to those users looking to gain a little more control over the stability of their overclocked system, the feature is still a desired one.

Knowing that making another BX board entry into the market without those two buzzword features would be viewed as an essentially futile attempt at competition by a niche of an already niche market, Iwill decided to give the users exactly what they wanted, neat concept eh? As a result, the BD100Plus not only features a jumperless CPU setup which is configurable through Iwill's Jumper Inside utility (sounds very Intel-ish), but it also boasts the ability to raise the core voltage of your CPU by either 5% or 10% depending on the jumper selection. A 5% core voltage increase to a processor running at 2.0v would yield a setting of 2.1v while a 10% increase would yield a 2.2v core voltage setting. On an older 2.8v chip (the first Pentium II processors ran at 2.8v), the 5% and 10% boost will take the core up to 2.94v and 3.08v respectively. For overclockers that can't seem to get a stable system, this little boost may be just what the doctor ordered, however if you're not an overclocker, consider this feature just about as useful as the ability to raise the I/O voltage supplied to the motherboard to 3.6v and 3.8v, a feature also provided for by the BD100Plus.

The jumperless setup of the BD100Plus allows for control over the unique clock generator on the BD100Plus. The reason for the description "unique" being that the clock generator supports the 66/75/83/100/105/110/112/124/133MHz range of FSB settings. The 105 and 110MHz settings are the unique ones, mainly for those overclockers that either don't want to push the limits of their system with the 112/124MHz settings or have one or more peripherals that aren't too friendly at the higher FSB frequencies. By default, the jumperless setup provides for clock multipliers up to 8.0x, however should the need arise for support for clock multipliers > 8.0x a simple BIOS flash should do the trick.

Although it's advertised as an "AGP Booster" feature, the function of JP11 on the BD100Plus is no more than to control the clock divider for the AGP bus. Leaving the jumper at its default setting results in an auto selection of the AGP clock ratio as a function of the FSB frequency, however by capping either the first two or the last two pins of the 3 pin jumper you can set the clock to be the same speed as the FSB frequency (1:1 ratio) or at 2/3 of the FSB frequency (2:3 ratio). This is no unique feature as it is provided for by the ABIT BH6 and the BX6 Revision 2, however in no way is it an "AGP Booster" other than the fact that it essentially overclocks the AGP bus. Running your AGP card at a frequency greater than its 66MHz specification doesn't really yield all that much of an increase in performance, at 100MHz most of today's AGP accelerators tend to fail upon start up. Your best bet is to keep the setting to auto, however if you're a tweaker there's no stopping you from experimenting.

The BIOS supplied with the BD100Plus by default is version 4.50PG of the Award BIOS setup, which unfortunately means that you don't get to enjoy the updated interface and features the new v4.60PG BIOS offers. Regardless, the BD100Plus does allow for the individual assignment of IRQs to each of the 5 PCI slots on the board, a feature reserved to BX6 Revision 2.0 owners alone as the BH6 unfortunately didn't allow for this very useful option. Not only does this allow for a quick and easy method to solving IRQ conflicts, but it can also be useful if you wish for the IRQ of a certain peripheral to remain constantly assigned to a certain value across multiple OSes and across multiple hard drives if you are prone to switching different drives often. The latter is truly useful in a testing lab situation, however the main function of the feature is to aid in preventing and solving IRQ conflicts, a definite plus for this BD100. The BIOS also suggests some minimal performance enhancing settings such as a recommendation to select CAS 2 upon boot. Hardware monitoring information is provided in the BIOS as well.

Featuring the popular Winbond 83781D to monitor two onboard fans, 7 voltages, and up to 3 temperatures, the BD100Plus leaves one of its three fans without monitoring capabilities. The reason for "up to 3 temperatures" is that the Winbond hardware monitor can only monitor one temperature on its own - the temperature of the Winbond chip itself. In order to monitor the other two temperatures, such as that of the CPU, the Winbond chip requires an external thermistor. Unlike most other manufacturers using the Winbond monitoring chip, Iwill has included a convenient clip on thermistor for mounting to the CPU. A single external thermistor header is present near the CPU, and Iwill provided an external thermistor for this very purpose. A second thermistor is already present directly underneath the SC242 (Slot-1) connector, and the third and final thermistor is present next to the 2-pin ATX soft on connector towards the end of the second ISA slot.

Out of the 24+ hours AnandTech tested the Iwill BD100Plus, it crashed a total of two times, both crashes weren't related to memory or other hardware issues rather seemingly software related crashes. While overclocked, even when using the 124MHz FSB setting, the BD100Plus performed on par with the ABIT BX6 Revision 2. The test bed's stability at 133MHz was hindered due to the unwillingness of the Matrox G200 to operate at the overclocked 88MHz AGP frequency. The performance of the BD100Plus was slightly higher than what competing boards tend to pull in as far as Winstone and Quake 2 benchmarks are concerned, however as AnandTech has made it a point to stress, performance should not be the deciding factor in any motherboard purchase unless the board in question is an unusually slow performer.

Iwill bundled the BD100Plus with a free copy of McAfee VirusScan as well as Adaptec EZ-SCSI 5.0. The latter was included most likely as a result of Iwill's extensive line of motherboards equipped with on-board SCSI controllers. The board also features the standard set of Bus Mastering drivers and patches for Windows 9x as well as a complimentary copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The Bad

If you happen to be an owner of a BX motherboard, there's no point in looking towards the BD100Plus as an upgrade unless you are simply fed up with your current motherboard for one reason or another.   The board itself is well made, however the days when the 5/2/1 expansion slot configuration is in demand are limited.  With 820 a few months away, an investment in a BX board now won't be a long term one.

The BD100Plus' user's manual isn't the best there could be, in fact it is mostly a regurgitation of the spec sheet and some diagrams of the motherboard.  There is a clear lack of helpful diagrams and illustrations present in the better examples of written documentation from companies like AOpen and ASUS.  Another discouraging factor is the availability of the BD100Plus, out of the 10 popular online vendors AnandTech chose at random, none of them carried any Iwill products, while ASUS, AOpen, and ABIT were among the most popular boards available.

A quick search returned a few vendors that did carry the BD100Plus at a somewhat hefty price of $129 (hefty compared to the < $90 for the BH6, but not bad considering the BX6 Revision 2 is available for around the same price), however the reputation of the vendors is another thing...

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 256MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM DIMM (for compatibility testing only)

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.mushkin.com

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

AnandTech Motherboard Testing Methodology

The Final Decision

If you can find it, the BD100Plus is an excellent choice for a BX motherboard.  However keep in mind that all you'll be getting is an ABIT BX6 Revision 2 alternative, with no real advantages over the tried and true solution from ABIT other than a smaller footprint.  If you haven't had the best of experiences with ABIT, maybe Iwill is your solution, if the situation is the opposite, maybe the BD100Plus isn't the board for you.

Overall, the board is worth looking at and does set itself apart from the rest of the sea of BX boards that seemingly mimic each other to an annoyingly high degree. 

How it Rates

Click Here to learn about AnandTech's Motherboard Testing Methodology.