X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 6)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Features

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 is equipped with a Socket754 and supports all modern CPUs from the Athlon 64 family that have a single-channel memory controller. This mainboard will also have no problems with the upcoming Athlon 64 3700+. Regrettably, the processor with the 3700+ performance rating is going to be the fastest model for the Socket 754 platform; faster CPUs will come out designed for the Socket 939. So, when purchasing a Socket 754 mainboard like the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250, you should be aware that your system upgrade opportunities will be somewhat limited. In perspective, AMD wants to turn Socket 754 into a socket for low-cost CPUs, like the Athlon XP on the Paris core (it comes with 256KB of the L2 cache and without x86-64 technology support).

The Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 is based around the same PCB as its predecessor, Zenith ZNF3-150, and this fact explains why not all of the chipset capabilities have been implemented in the mainboard. Yes, the two chipsets (nForce3 150 and 250) are pin-compatible, but the latter chipset has much broader functionality. As a result, the only difference between the two Zenith mainboards from Chaintech is the faster HyperTransport bus in the ZNF3-250. This is not little, though. The nForce3 150 chipset was criticized for clocking the HyperTransport bus that connects the chipset to the processor at a very low rate. This limitation of the chipset, even though the memory controller is integrated into the processor in Athlon 64 systems, resulted in a performance reduction caused by the lower bandwidth of the CPU-chipset channel. Now the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has got rid of this disadvantage and Athlon 64 processors can communicate with the chipset at full speed in this mainboard.

As for other advantages of the nForce3 250 over the predecessor, Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard doesn’t show them up. This mainboard, like the older product, has only six USB ports, while SerialATA and RAID arrays support is implemented via external onboard controllers. In fact, all that the chipset is responsible for in the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard is the support of two ATA/133 channels and six USB 2.0 ports. The back panel of the mainboard carries only two of the USB ports. The rest are attached to the CBOX3 panel which outputs two ports to the front panel of your system case, while two more are used to attach the card-reader.

All other capabilities of this mainboard are provided by external controllers. Networking options are implemented through a Gigabit Ethernet BCM5788KFB controller from Broadcom. The Fast Ethernet logical-level controller integrated into the NVIDIA nForce3 250 didn’t make Chaintech engineers happy.

The same engineers gave up the AC’97 audio support included into the nForce3. Instead, ZNF3-250 comes equipped with an Envy24HT, a PCI audio controller from VIA that supports eight-channel sound and 192kHz/24bit mode, usually available only in hi-end audio solutions. The analog part of the audio subsystem is perfectly implamented: overall, the ZNF3-250 has an excellent audio solution.