Overclockers Australia - Transcend TS-ASL3

Transcend TS-ASL3 Motherboard
Review by James "Agg" Rolfe

It's been a while since we've had a motherboard review here on OCAU. Because of that, this review covers a few firsts for us - our first Socket370 motherboard review, our first i815 review and our first product from Transcend. While this Taiwanese company doesn't have a big name here in Australia, they've been making memory since 1988 and motherboards since 1998 - with international sales growth of 41.8% in 2000 they're certainly a rising star. They are increasingly turning their attention from the OEM market to the retail side, so expect to see more of them in future.

the board - click to enlarge (a lot!)

This motherboard is based on Intel's i815E chipset. I confess I haven't been following the chipset market too closedly, but have been peripherally aware of a few variants of the Intel's i815 product. I did a little digging around to clear things up and found a couple of useful pages on Intel's site, here and here and most usefully the table here. Turns out i815EP is the "performance" version with ATA-100, 4 USB ports and no onboard video. i815 only supports UDMA/66, 2 USB ports and has integrated video. i815EM is a mobile version for laptops etc, and the i815E that we have here is like i815EP, but with built-in graphics. That's right folks, it's an integrated motherboard - get back!

jam-packed - click to enlarge

Alright, calm down - I know this is an overclocking site and integrated motherboards are seen as only suitable for building your grandmother's PC around.. but give it a chance. As you can see in the above photo, it has onboard sound (thanks to the integrated AC97 audio in the southbridge) and onboard "Intel 3D" video - if you didn't notice, the COM2 port has been replaced with a HD15 VGA connector. The board comes with a ribbon cable and backplate, you connect this to the motherboard to give you COM2 access from the back of the machine. This seems to be a standard way to do it, I have another integrated motherboard here for review and it has the same setup.

Anyway. Back to why you shouldn't instinctively hate this motherboard because it's "integrated". Lack of power-user features, you say? Well, how do these strike you?

AGP4X support in case you do decide to slap a GeForce Ultra into it - and Intel's implementation of AGP4X in this chipset has proven itself to be remarkably trouble-free, much more so than VIA's competing Apollo Pro 133A. Read the P3V4X / CUV4X forum lately? :)
2x IDE ports with ATA-100 support. No dramas trying to boot off an additional onboard controller for ATA-100 here.
66/100/133MHz FSB support
Support for FCPGA Coppermine P3's and CeleronII's.
Selectable FSB's up to 166MHz (we'll see how far the board actually clocks later on)
6 busmaster-capable PCI slots
3x SDRAM slots, total supported 512MB
Asynchronous memory bus allowing 100MHz or 133MHz at 133MHz FSB, but only 100MHz at 100MHz FSB
Support for 4 USB ports (2 on backplane, separate connector required for the other two, not included)
Wake-on-Lan, Wake-on-Ring, Timed Wake-Up, IrDA connector and all the other little fiddly bits you'd expect a modern chipset/motherboard to have.

Not too shabby, hmm? Sure, there's nothing amazingly new, but I can't think of anything they're missing. The layout's not too bad either - there are 4 large capacitors near both the front and back of the CPU socket, but they leave room directly out from the centre lug to avoid fouling your clip or screwdriver when you're putting a heatsink/fan unit on. There's plenty of room on either side of the CPU socket (until you hit the back of the parallel port or the northbridge heatsink which are both well away) and the location of the power connector, running along the top left edge of the board, is excellent. Room for the 6 PCI slots and AMR seems to have been created by moving the SDRAM slots almost to the edge of the board, the CPU socket near the ATX edge connector and putting the northbridge in the middle, next to the processor, instead of below the CPU socket as I'm used to from many SocketA boards. The board's fairly small - a little wider than a P3V4X but nowhere near as wide as an A7V, and it has a clean, uncluttered feel which is surprising considering how much is included onboard.

Ahh, you say, but the classic argument against integrated motherboards is that you're paying for features you might not want! You've got a GeForce2 Ultra, you've got an SBLive!, you don't need those onboard features and you don't want to pay for them if you're just going to turn them off! I know this argument well, because I supported it in my Asus K7V review among others. To counter that is kinda tricky, because it's hard to find anyone who actually sells this motherboard. SecretNet quoted me $225 a month or more ago, Realtime say tonight nearer to $245. Either way, it compares pretty well to other i815E boards like the CUSL2 which is over $300. Further, try finding a modern chipset that DOESN'T have at least an onboard audio codec - sticking connectors and the supporting logic on the board isn't going to add much to the total cost. As for the onboard video..

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