X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 8)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

PCB Design

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 has the same impressive looks as its predecessor, using the same black PCB with orange slots and gold-plated connectors. The extravagant coloring is not the only curious thing about the design of the mainboard – it is distinguishable for the CPU voltage regulator module in the first hand.

First, it is implemented according to a rarely-seen four-phase circuit to provide highest-stability current under high loads. Second, this module is equipped with the RadEX cooling system of a very original construction. Chaintech engineers probably took their inspiration from ABIT with its OTES cooling solution employed in MAX3 mainboard series. Although the CPU voltage regulator doesn’t require active cooling in modern mainboards, Chaintech placed an aluminum heatsink on all MOSFETs, covered it with a casing and set a 20mm fan to direct the airflow at the heatsink. Moreover, there is a copper heat pipe inside the sole of this weird cooler, which facilitates heat transfer, moving heat from the warmest areas of the heatsink to the coldest.

Again, it’s quite useless to have a special cooling system installed onto the CPU voltage regulator module – the module can live happily without it. On the other hand, the RadEX system employed in the Chaintech ZNF3-250 does help to reduce the inter-case temperature in a way. It also cools the MOSFETs very well, that’s for sure.

When testing Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 in practice, we noticed that the Vcore was always higher than the nominal norm. Moreover, we were greatly displeased with the fact that this mainboard didn’t support the Cool’n’Quiet technology. The system hangs up completely when the processor driver or a special-purpose utility tries to change the multiplier with the Cool’n’Quiet technology enabled. I hope the Chaintech engineers will solve this problem in the next versions of the BIOS.