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Transcend's position is a very unique one indeed. Now a full scale manufacturer of a wide range of motherboards and memory modules, Transcend can be considered the "one and only" in the industry to specialize in both areas.
80% Rating: 
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Transcend AVE3 |
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Overclocking and Conclusion
Transcend's AVE3
does come equipped with a good array of front side bus speeds to choose from. A
user has the option of selecting FSB speeds in the range of 66 - 150MHz.
However, the actual implementation of the options may be not so digestible for
the hardcore overclocker. If you have an officially supported 66MHz CPU such as
the Celeron, you overclocking options are strictly limited to speeds under
100MHz. For 100MHz CPUs, one is restricted to FSB's of less than 133MHz... and so
forth with 133MHz CPUs (Pentium III EB). As many 100MHz Coppermine CPUs are able
to tolerate a 143MHz overclock, the AVE3 would not be an ideal board for such
purposes.
With my experiences, I was only able to take up the Celeron 400
to a speed of 500MHz, or an 83MHz FSB. No option was available (ie: 90MHz,
95MHz) to go above and beyond that. When setting the FSB to 100MHz, the Celeron
refused to POST up at 600MHz. However, the unique aspect of the AVE3 is the
ability to boot at default speed provided that your CPU or RAM will not be able
to sustain a particular overclock. This certainly saved me the time of having to
clear the CMOS with each failed overclocking attempt.
On a positive note,
the AVE3 was able to maintain system stability with each overclock which was
sufficient enough to POST. As a matter of fact, the system was left on
continuously for 4 days running various application without a single system
crash. Though it might not be able to take overclocked speeds very high, the
AVE3 can certainly remain stable at those speeds it can run at.
There are a number of options available which allow you to
"tweak" your system. Within the system BIOS, one has the option of manually
configuring memory modules with each bank independent of the other. So one bank
of RAM can be set as PC100 and another can be tuned as PC133. This is
particularly useful for those who do have differing "flavours" of memory.
Secondly, system memory can be run asynchronous of system clock speeds.
Particularly, one can operate memory at either +33MHz or
-33MHz of the HOSTCLK. This is something which is commonly found on many
VIA Apollo Pro 133A based motherboards. Pentium III EB owners can breathe a sigh
of relief if PC133 memory is not available. PC100 can run just fine with this
particularly useful feature. Column Access Strobe, or CAS for short, can be set
at either 2 or 3 depending on which your memory can
support.
Disappointingly enough, Transcend's AVE3 does not provide
support for Vcore modification.
Conclusions
Extremely strong performance under Winstone 99 and Content
Creation Winstone 2000 almost brought the infamous Asus P3B-F to its knees. The
Apollo Pro 133A chipset has been touted to exhibit performance below that of any
440BX based motherboard. Interestingly enough, we finally found an
exception.
The primary reason we did not award the Transcend AVE3
Editor's Choice was the rather average overclocking potential. Though in the
majority of applications overclocking is seldom implemented, it certainly is
tested for in the PCi labs. For those of you out there who are not interested in
such endeavors, I would highly recommend the AVE3 to be put into your
system.
Whether it be home or office use, you can certainly be relieved
to know that the AVE3 will operate smoothly, efficiently and extremely stable.
The most cleanest and "planned" layout and design is certainly an added
benefit.
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