Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-150 Motherboard Review

It is still very early in the game for the Athlon64, the processor has been in development for quite some time and only two companies have come to market with chipset solutions. VIA has their K8T800 chipset that uses a more traditional Northbridge and Southbridge configuration whereas nVidia has come to the table with a single chip solution that on paper is far more appealing. Many companies have staying away from the nVidia solution for various reasons but as you can see it isn't a bad product at all.

The feature package of the Chaintech ZNF3-150 is outstanding and provides support for all of the major peripheral technologies. IEEE1394 has been gaining traction on the PC side of things and Onboard SerialATA RAID is a great bonus for any high-end system. Though the most unique feature is the onboard digital audio and CMC (Multimedia card). Pair that with the Envy24PT PCI Audio Controller (DSP) and you get full 7.1 digital surround sound. The CMR slot is a nice addition though since it can only be used in conjunction with the CMC I find it somewhat wasteful.

Overall I really liked this board; performance was solid with no problems during setup or testing. The synthetic benchmarks put the ZNF3-150 behind the reference system but in a strange twist the board won every real world benchmark we had. In the case of the Athlon64 3200+ we obviously cannot judge performance by synthetic numbers alone.

Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.

Black PCB
Orange expansion slots with gold trim.
7.1 Digital Audio
4ch. SerialATA RAID
CMR and CMC
CBOX3 Included
Very Strong PCB, (i.e. no flexing)

CMR and CMC
Limited PCI usage in some situations (watercooling + long PCI cards)
No Active MCP Cooling

I would like to thank Chaintech for helping to make this review possible.
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