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| Installation
and Setup With The ASL3 |
| Make
sure you get revision 1.04 or later
of this board. |
|
The ASL3 was a very forgiving board with respect
to setup and installation. In addition,
Transcend does a nice job of packing in a few
extra goodies to make sure you have whatever you
need to complete your system with respect to their
product.
Our
cable pack included both Serial and USB
Port header/cable assemblies, in addition to the
connectors already mounted on the board. This is a nice
touch versus many of the boards we get these days
with just EIDE and Floppy cables.
During
power up there were no pitfalls to report with the
exception of one minor issue with an older
revision of this board and it's BIOS.
|
CPU
Setup
|
SDRAM
Timing
|
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CPU
Voltage Adjust
|
Health
Monitoring
| The
first version of the ASL3 that we received was
rev. 1.03. We had trouble setting the CPU
voltage in the BIOS (bottom left) and it was not
affecting this setting whatsoever. We
contacted Transcend and were quickly sent revision
1.04 of the board. We are happy to report,
that this rev. worked flawlessly with respect to any of the BIOS
settings including CPU Voltage adjustments.
If you are going to purchase this board, just make
sure the dealer gives you revision 1.04 or later.
The
rest of the BIOS options are top notch. For
133MHz. FSB processors, you can set front side bus
speeds from 133 to 166MHz. in 1MHz. increments.
The
board has a series of jumpers you can set for
specific front side bus speeds supported by your
processor. For 100MHz. FSB processors you'll
get options from 100 to 132MHz. in 1MHz.
increments. Although jumpers are usually not
a welcomed feature, this arrangement is very
convenient none the less. Since most folks
running today's "Coppermine" CPUs are
already utilizing a 133MHz. FSB, the range of
speed options available in the BIOS are more than
adequate. Which brings us to our next
segment.
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| Overclocking
With The ASL3 |
| Ready
for the challenge, rock solid
stability |
|
With a
wide range of FSB options available to us in the
BIOS, we were poised to overclock to our heart's
content. In addition, the jumper settings
you noted above, adjust the "range" of the voltage
adjustments in the BIOS. There are three
settings available, "low, medium and
high". The default setting is medium
and with this, we were able to set the voltage up
to as much as .4V over spec. This is more
than enough for anybody, at least in our book.
With only .1V over spec, we took our 933MHz.
Pentium III up a few notches with excellent
stability.
1.03GHz.(147MHz.
X 7) is a nice boost up from 933. With our fairly
hefty Global Win Cooler from PCNut,
we were able to keep things stable at
this speed without the need for anything exotic or
expensive cooling the CPU. For us,
the ASL3 was an impressive
"over-clocker".
Benchmarks
- Sandra and Business Winstone
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