Transcend
TS-ABX11
Manufacturer
Transcend
Retail
Price $110
Expansion
Slot : 5/2/1
With
a 5 PCI, 2 ISA (1 PCI/ISA shared), 1 AGP expansion slot configuration
and bus speed support for more or less everything you can think
of (6, 68, 75, 83, 100, 103, 112, 117, 124, 129, 133, 143, 148 and
153MHz), the Transcend TS-ABX11 makes a good first impression. The
layout of the board has its plus and minus points… which spoils
that good first impression a little but not much. On the plus side,
the IDE and floppy connectors are located quite conveniently in
front of the DIMM sockets, (of which there are only three) but the
CMOS clearing jumper is stuck off in a corner (ah, the horror) behind
the ISA slots. There are 10 capacitors, but the ones near the CPU
Slot 1 connector are a wee bit too close to it, since the CPU bumps
on the capacitors. Definitely puts a little tarnish on the good
first impression.
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Another
big plus point for this board- hardware monitoring features
are pretty good on the TS-ABX11,
including the Winbond W83781D chipset. You get DIP switches
for adjusting CPU clock ratios from 3.5x to 8x in 0.5 increments.
As
with most new boards, the TS-ABX11 offers a jumperless setup.
A particularly welcome feature is that the board allows you
to set individual IRQs manually for PCI slots, which is one
of those features that every board should have but doesn't.
As for extras, the board comes with a fairly extensive manual
and an installation CD.
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What
about overclocking? Well, it's rather disappointing… I experienced
four crashes when benchmarking this board at 117MHz using PC-133
SDRAM, and the same problems occurred at 124MHz as well. Meaning
this board is limited to 112MHz or so when overclocking.
Nowadays,
this just doesn't cut it. Don't look to this board for overclocking.
However, though hardcore overclockers don't always notice,
there are plenty of people out there who have no intention
in the world of overclocking their boards, as we've said before
in this roundup, so non-overclockability does not by any means
disqualify a motherboard. If you're not into overclocking,
this is a pretty good board, the only problem being that "pretty
good" is not quite good enough for a BX board at this late
stage.
It's
usually a question of picking the best now, not just picking
a good one, so be mindful of other choices.
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