i820 Motherboard Roundup - January 2000

Transcend TS-ACA1

Transcend is a motherboard manufacturer that we just recently discovered, and they do produce some fairly high quality products.  With the exception of their Apollo Pro 133 board, we haven’t had many problems with the Transcend motherboards that we’ve tested.

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The TS-ACA1 isn’t too different.  It’s a plain vanilla i820 board: it features 5 PCI slots, an AMR slot and a regular AGP 4X slot.  There is no option for an ISA add-on and the board features the same 2 RIMM slots that most i820 boards will boast. 

The stability of the board was about average for an i820; while it wasn’t as reliable as the two A’s (AOpen and ASUS) it was decent.  If the price is right, the TS-ACA1 may just offer a good value, but if you’re willing to foot the cost of RDRAM, then you shouldn’t mind spending an additional $30 - $40 on an AOpen or an ASUS. 

The TS-ACA1 wasn’t the best overclocker either.  Our FC-PGA 550E at 733MHz crashed more on the TS-ACA1 than on any of the other boards, with the exception of the Supermicro PIIISCA.