X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 11)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 04/07/2004 | 03:15 PM ]

At the same time, the BIOS allows fine-tuning the memory subsystem by changing the timings and setting the desired working frequency.

Chaintech includes the DigiDoc utility with its mainboard for monitoring the system status from the Windows environment. It monitors the processor and system temperatures, the rotation speeds of the CPU cooler and the system fan, and all main voltages.

As for the practical overclocking tests, we decided to take an Athlon 64 3200+ processor for them, which was rated for work at 2.0GHz. Right now, this Socket 754 processor allows reaching highest FSB clock rates without changing the CPU multiplier. The Thermaltake Silent Boost K8, an ordinary air cooler, was responsible for cooling this CPU. We also used special overclocker memory modules, OCZ PC4000 Gold Edition, which were guaranteed to work at frequencies up to 500MHz. This memory allowed us to overclock our Athlon 64 3200+ without increasing the memory frequency divisor (it was set as 1/10 of the CPU frequency during our tests, or “DDR400” as the BIOS Setup termed it).

Our earlier experiments with speeding up Socket 754 mainboards showed that you can only reach high overclocking results by using ATA-100/133 hard disk drives. The use of SerialATA HDDs usually led to failures in the disk subsystem, even after a slight increase of the FSB frequency. The point is that many Socket 754 mainboards clock the PCI bus, to which the SerialATA controller attaches, synchronously with the FSB, and the frequencies of these two buses go up together. SerialATA controllers that use a serial interface with a data-transfer frequency of 1.5GHz for communicating with hard disk drives start experiencing problems even when the PCI clock rate grows to 36MHz.

The reviewed mainboard, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250, is free from this problem, though. It clocks the FSB and PCI buses asynchronously, allowing the use of SerialATA drives.

Increasing the FSB clock rate smoothly, we reached the ceiling at 232MHz. On further growth of the FSB clock rate, the system lost stability. Regrettably, without the option of lowering the CPU multiplier, we hit the roof for this particular processor too soon. We also reached this result with other, older chipsets. Thus, the practical overclocking tests of the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 bring no surprises, even through NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset is theoretically very suitable for overclocking.

Once again, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 offers no means to control the CPU multiplier in the BIOS or from Windows-based utilities – the system hangs up when you try to use them. Anyway, we felt the positive effect of the asynchronous clocking of the AGP/PCI buses in our tests as the overclocked mainboard could work stably with SerialATA hard disk drives.