After careful consideration I have decided to transfer all hardware review activities to a new domain. I purchased Hardwareasylum.com in 2012 and have been working hard to build a new and improved Ninjalane on that domain. If you are reading this you have reached one of the archived articles, news, projects and/or reviews that were left behind during the site migration.
Please update your bookmarks and be sure to visit the new and improved Ninjalane at Hardwareasylum.com
Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-150 Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Friday, November 21, 2003
Board Layout and Features
Zenith series motherboards have been well known for having the most included features, onboard or otherwise. The Chaintech ZNF3-150 is no exception with many of the onboard features actually replacing items normally included in the chipset.
A 4-Channel Silicon Image RAID controller provides the SerialATA connections and supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 1+0. (Raptor RAID 5 * Dr00l *) Onboard firewire is made possible by the VIA controller chip also seen in the photo.
With the traditional Northbridge out of the way board designers can be more flexible with the placement of PCI slots. The ZNF3-150 has 5 with an additional CMR (Chaintech Multimedia Riser) slot located at the bottom. This connection isn't unlike the CNR slots that we all hoped would go away but, this one actually serves a purpose.
With the traditional Northbridge out of the way board designers can be more flexible with the placement of PCI slots. The ZNF3-150 has 5 with an additional CMR (Chaintech Multimedia Riser) slot located at the bottom. This connection isn't unlike the CNR slots that we all hoped would go away but, this one actually serves a purpose.
The nForce3 MCP chip features a removable passive heatsink with very few fins to dissipate heat. Much to my surprise there is no thermal compound between the heatsink and MCP chip, the scuffmarks show that contact to the center of the chip is not being made.
With further investigation it was discovered that Chaintech doesn't apply thermal compound on this board and leaves it up to the consumer to decide if they want any. Chaintech does include a small tube of thermal compound with each motherboard, my suggestion, put some on there. We like Artic Silver III but you can use whatever you like.
With further investigation it was discovered that Chaintech doesn't apply thermal compound on this board and leaves it up to the consumer to decide if they want any. Chaintech does include a small tube of thermal compound with each motherboard, my suggestion, put some on there. We like Artic Silver III but you can use whatever you like.
Look at all of those pins, all 754 of them. The Athlon64 is slightly larger than a Pentium 4 but is still smaller than an Athlon XP; almost a perfect fit right in the middle. The heatsink cage is removable so alterative-cooling solutions can be installed, currently heatsink solutions are fairly limited.
The 754pin Athlon64 processors feature a single channel DDR 400 memory controller that is reflected in the memory slots here. As the sticker illustrates you need to populate DIMM 1 first in any configuration up to 2GB.
