The TS-ABR4/NR is one of the latest boards manufactured by Transcend and comes with both onboard LAN and support for an ATA-100 RAID setup.

The PCB is well built, but seems lacking in features until you take a closer look. Unlike any other RAID-equipped board, the I/O connectors for the RAID drives use the same two colours as the two standard IDE ports, and they are in fact labeled IDE3 and 4.

Controlling the RAID setup is an integrated Promise PDC20265R chip, which supports RAID 0 and 1. An Intel 82562 LAN chip provides the integrated 10/100-network connectivity. As for expansion, the TS-ABR4 supports the standard features, five PCI slots, AGP 4X slot and a single CNR slot.

The 845D chipset only supports a maximum of 2GB of memory, and with Transcend only supplying the TS-ABR-4 with two DIMM slots, it doesn't allow much flexibility with the memory configuration. After all, 1GB modules of DDR memory are neither common nor cheap.

Despite this failing, the TS-ARB4 performs reasonably well and the added attraction of onboard LAN and RAID is likely to appeal to some specialist machine builders.