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Transcend
TS-ASL3 Motherboard - Page 2
Review by
James
"Agg" Rolfe
Onboard Video
Lets look at this in a little more detail. Buried deep in the
82815 North Bridge chip (or as they call it, Graphic and Memory
Controller Hub) is an Intel i752 video adapter with 4MB of ram.
This adapter is sadly incapable of running in 32bit colour depth
in any resolution according to the specs - the highest it can
handle is 24bit. This means in most games you are stuck in 16bit
mode. It can handle resolutions up to 1152x864 and 24-bit colour
there. You can install DirectX so you CAN play most modern games,
but realistically you're probably not going to want to. On my
test machine with a P3-667EB and 133MHz CAS2 memory, the onboard
video got itself a whopping score of 922 in 3DMark2000. I was
going to draw some fancy graphs to show the difference, but instead
just imagine a really short bar next to a really long bar, that's
the i815e's onboard video compared to pretty much any other video
card you can buy. Of course, Intel don't expect you to be buying
this motherboard intending to use the onboard video to replace
your whizzo video card - it's more for OEM's and people without
intensive video needs.
One particularly odd thing I noticed
is that, with the i815e onboard video driver in use, the Sandra
2001 memory benchmark dropped to 318/366 from the 393/464 it scored
with the GF2U present in the machine and the Detonator drivers
in use. Whether this is a driver glitch or due to the motherboard
chipset genuinely being more busy handling the graphics, I couldn't
say. However, even allowing for that strange drop in memory throughput,
the overall speed of the onboard adapter is still pretty woeful
for 3D.
Onboard Sound
There's info here about the inbuilt AC97 audio and I don't
have a whole lot to say about it. Plug-junkies may be dissapointed
that there's only microphone, line in and line out jacks, but
apparently it's a reasonably full-featured 16-bit audio architecture
with support for 6 channels etc. I'm not much of a sound freak
- for normal MP3 usage the audio sounded a little muffled to me,
you could compensate with more volume but it doesn't sound as
clear as the SBLive I'm normally used to. I compared the onboard
sound with an SBLive! using Ziff-Davis's Audio
Winbench - again I'll save you from a massive graph but in
the CPU utilization tests the onboard audio ranged as high as
22.4% while the SBLive! never broke the 4% mark. Bad quality and
high CPU utilization, I can't really think of a reason to use
the onboard audio unless all you ever hear is the system sounds..
Installation
Installing this motherboard was pretty simple. I did find that
the power connector placement ends up being right under the bottom
intake fan of my Enermax power supply - it doesn't block airflow
enough for me to want to do anything about it, but it's there.
Otherwise no dramas, connector layout makes it pretty easy to
keep cables out of the way for good airflow.
Installing Win98SE was easier
than I expected given the new chipset on this motherboard. I booted
off the CD and installed as per usual, then used the included
CD, stepping through the autostart menu in order to install chipset-specific
drivers, drivers for the onboard sound and video and ATA100 controller.
A few reboots later and I was up and running in a nice high resolution
with sound. Switching to the Asus GeForce2 Ultra card was simple,
it autodetected on boot - installing the Detonators proved hassle-free
as well. For the benchmarking I used the latest i815e drivers
available from Intel here.
This motherboard comes with a
few interesting things on the included CD - one of which is ezBIOS.
From within windows, this neato little tool connects over the
internet to Transcend's server and checks if there's a more recent
BIOS available than the one you're running. If there is, and if
you give it permission, it will download and - using Award's WinFlash
utility - write the new image into your motherboard's EEPROM.
All within Windows with only a couple of keystrokes required.
Of course, you can still boot off a DOS disk and flash from there
if you feel you must, or if you use a non-windows operating system.
Performance
I tested using an Intel P3-667EB. This is of course a 133MHz FSB
part. I tested it against an Asus P3V4X motherboard, based on
the Apollo Pro 133A chipset. I do have a BX-based motherboard
here, but the limited AGP divisors make BX problematic at 133MHz
FSB - it can be done, but I don't want to risk my GeForce2U at
that high an AGP speed. For drivers/BIOS files, I used the latest
version available from the manufacturer's website. I don't think
it's fair to use betas in comparisons and to be honest there's
just too many beta/tweaked/leaked versions of things out there.
Testbed 1:
Transcend TS-ASL3 (Intel i815e)
Intel i815e drivers v2.80.010A
BIOS 1.05
Intel onboard video drivers version 6.2
(get the latest drivers for i815e here)
Tesbed 2:
Asus P3V4X (VIA Apollo Pro 133A)
BIOS 1005
VIA 4-in-1 429v (get them here)
Common:
Corsair CAS2 SDRAM (128MB) (review here)
Quantum Fireball +KA 13GB
Win98SE
DirectX 8.0a
Detonator 650
Sandra 2001:
Nothing too surprising there,
the difference between the scores is trivial..
The memory scores are more interesting.
Both systems were measured with the Asus GeForce 2 Ultra card
installed - remember earlier I said that the Transcend board's
memory score was noticeably lower (318/366) than with the GF2U
in use. I figure none of my readers are going to use the onboard
video and this discrepancy looks like a driver issue so may be
fixed at some point. The difference compared to the P3V4X isn't
too significant - remember the P3V4X and the Apollo Pro
133A chipset that powers it have proven themselves two of the
most tweakable things in the overclocking scene. These scores
are with the latest release BIOS and drivers but a determined
tweaker with WCPREDIT and the patience to wade through the P3V4X
forum would no doubt be able to squeeze more from the board.
NEXT PAGE - Performance continued, Overclocking
and Conclusions..
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