Iwill today announced its new Socket A mainboard KD266 based on ALi’s new M1649 North Bridge and M1535D+ South Bridge. KD266 will be the Ultimate Value motherboard for the mainstream consumer market. Ultimate Value features include: support for 200/266MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) Athlon and Duron CPUs, Low Pass Filter technology and native dual-channel Ultra ATA/100 support for 4 IDE devices. There are the following expansion slots available on the board: 6 PCI, 1 AGP 4x and 3 DIMM slots supporting up to 3GB PC100/PC133 SDRAM.
The overclocking friendly features include Microstepping Technology, which allows adjusting the FSB frequency via continuous 1MHz increments up to 166MHz.
We have to stress that ALI 1649 core logic the mainboard is based on is a competitor to VIA KT133A, but sells at a remarkably low price. It will make the boards on this chipset considerably cheaper than KT133A based ones. However, we assume that the story of ALi MAGiK 1 may repeat now, when ALi based mainboard show not very high performance.