Thursday, December 02, 1999

Introduction

Transcend Information Inc. was founded by its originator, Peter Shu, in 1988. A decade of experience has served to place Transcend at the forefront of the big international motherboard manufacturers. This analysis will be our first look at a Transcend product, and it will cover two items simultaneously. One part will be our analysis of the TS-AVD1 motherboard, and the second, will be our use of a 128MB PC133 memory module also fabricated by Transcend, and that will be installed on the TS-AVD1 for the duration of the tests.

The last item to recount before the testing begins, is to point out that the TS-AVD1 is based on VIA's Apollo Pro133 chipset. All that said, and done, on with the suite of this review.

The Features

Expansion of the TS-AVD1 is made possible through its 5 PCI slots, 2 ISA slots, and 1 AGP port. Also, 3 168-pin DIMM sockets are located on-board, providing room for 768MB of memory.

Configuration of the TS-AVD1 clock frequency is accomplished via the "Chipset Features Setup" BIOS submenu. As concerns adjustment of the clock multiplier, this value can be set through an array of Dip switches (SW1) found on the motherboard. That said, it must be pointed out that Intel locked the clock multiplier of their processors (except for those pre-dating the PIII), so their is no point in wracking your brain by playing with Dips; the processor will ignore this information. Finally, on the motherboard, a series of jumpers referred as JP1 permit the choice of the frequency of the system front side bus. Available options include: automatic adjustment by the system, 66Mhz, 100Mhz, and 133Mhz. As always, the BIOS allows the user to set the operating frequency of the memory bus to that of the system bus, and to add or subtract 33Mhz from that figure.

No options for altering the processor's core voltage is provided.

Available clock frequencies, according to the user's manual, include: 66 / 68 / 75 / 83 / 95 / 100 / 112 / 117 / 124 / 133 / 138 / 140 / and 150Mhz, with clock multipliers of 3.5X to 8X in steps of .5X.

Suite: Additional Features.