X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 7)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

The chipset’s SerialATA controller was also discarded. Engineers had to give up its implementation because of the peculiarities of the PCB, which the Zenith ZNF3-250 inherited from its older mate. Anyway, the mainboard has a SerialATA-150 Sil3114 controller from Silicon Image onboard that offers you four SerialATA channels and an option of uniting the attached hard disk drives into RAID arrays of levels 0, 1 and 0+1. The functionality of the mainboard thus didn’t suffer and if the use of the redundant onboard controller doesn’t tell on the price of the product, I think this solution should be considered acceptable. Moreover, considering the problems NVIDIA has with RAID drivers, the use of the time-tested controller instead of the one integrated into the chipset may be quite justified.

That’s not all, though. Besides the above-described things, the PCB of the ZNF3-250 carries a VIA VT6306 chip, which is responsible for three IEEE1394 ports.

Thus, notwithstanding the old PCB, the Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard offers you the richest functionality. The CBOX3 panel that you receive with the mainboard also contributes to enhancing the functionality scope.

CBOX3 is in fact a panel to be installed into the 5¼-bay of the system case. The panel carries the following connectors: two USB 2.0 ports, a headphones output and microphone input, one IEEE1394 port, a card reader and an indicator of POST codes, called DigiDoc. If you use the exclusive software (the DigiDoc utility), you may have the indicator show the processor temperature at work. CBOX3 comes with three “skins” so you can use it in system cases of different colors without spoiling their color design.

Besides three DDR DIMM slots, an AGP 8x slot and five PCI slots, the Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has a unique CMR slot (Chaintech Multimedia Raiser) for installation of the CMC 7.1 card. You find this card among the mainboard’s accessories and it serves to output certain I/O ports to the outside of the system case. The I/O panel of the ZNF3-250 mainboard itself carries just two PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, two COM ports, one LPT and two USB 2.0 ports, an RJ-45 connector for Gigabit Ethernet and three audio jacks. The CMC 7.1 adds the following: two IEEE1394 ports, three audio jacks and an optical SPDIF output.

I could gripe, though, that the mainboard has only four available USB 2.0 ports (counting the CBOX3 in), which may be not enough for a modern computer system.