Review: IWill P4HT-S i845PE

It appears that colour co-ordination has been taken to the next level. Not only is the PCB the dark shade of red favoured by, amongst others, MSI and ATi, we also see the RAM, PCI, and CPU retention bracket get the same treatment. If you're one for aesthetics, you'll instantly like Iwill's baby. The green and yellow headers on the bottom-right of the above picture serve as Smartcard and an extra serial slots.

Not only does the Northbridge have an appealing fan on it, 3 LEDs shine once you power it up. This is the first time that I've seen this on a full production motherboard. Iwill obviously think that their motherboards should perform in both the performance and looks departments.

Iwill have chosen to go with only 2 DIMM slots for this particular motherboard; we've seen 3 on the majority of Intel DDR-based motherboards. This may seem like an oversight on Iwill's part, but filling all 3 DIMM slots on the aforementioned motherboards requires some careful memory planning (DIMMS 2 and 3 need to be single-sided). In that context, 2 should be fine for most users, especially as it's directly catering for PC2700 memory.

My first complaint lies with the positioning of the USB 2.0 ports 5 & 6 header. It sits directly below the AGP slot, such that most video cards will effectively block it out. Iwill don't supply the necessary bracket to make use of the header anyway. Just below it is an isolated USB2.0 port. The first time I've seen one on the PCB itself. That leaves 3 USB2.0 ports (from a possible 6) which reside on the backplane.

The bottom-left, as always, plays host to the inevitable RAID setup. This time we're graced with both standard IDE and Serial ATA varieties. The Promise PDC20275 controller can host 4 hard drives on 2 ports located below the PCI slots.

The Silicon Image chip provides support for the 2 S-ATA interfaces that sit above it. You can set the motherboard to boot from the S-ATA interface if you have the appropriate converters or drives. The S.I chip also supports the option of RAIDing 2 S-ATA drives in much the same fashion as a standard IDE RAID controller. Some may argue that the positioning of the RAID controller ports is a little poor. With my case at least, the positioning is perfect, as extra hard drives have an additional cage at the bottom of my case (Lian-Li PC60).

The tiny ALC650 sound chip offers 6-speaker support. Iwill have maximised this by offering inputs for all. The CODEC is impressive for an on-board solution. The sound, whilst not rivaling a dedicated hardware solution, is pretty good. The ubiquitous Realtek 10/100 Ethernet controller is present once more. It's becoming largely standard on most motherboards now.

The outputs for 6-channel sound area all present and correct on the backplane. The black audio serves as the output for the two rear channels, the orange gives you subwoofer / centre speaker options, and the line-out jack (green) controls the front 2 speakers. Further, you can maximise the sound quality with the S/PDIF out socket (next to the sub output). This allows you to connect the combined sound to a digital decoder.

3 USB2.0 ports make up the 6 possible on offer from the ICH4 Southbridge. PS/2 ports, the RJ45 LAN port, and the the serial ports finish off an well-specified motherboard. Apart from a couple of niggles, it's well laid out and beautifully presented.