X-bit labs

First Mass Mainboard on NVIDIA nForce3 250: Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 Review (page 9)

Category: Chipsets

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

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

Although the RadEX’s “exhaust” has appeared at the mainboard connections panel, it still contains enough connectors: two PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, two serial and one parallel port, an RJ-45 network connector, a couple of USB ports and three audio jacks.

So we have actually lost only two USB ports, and this makes Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 mainboard less appealing to the user. Besides the two USB ports at the back panel, the mainboard supports four ports more: two of them are occupied by the card reader from the CBOX3 panel, and the remaining two are outputted to the front panel of the system case by means of the same CBOX3. As a result, the mainboard offers the user just four ports out of eight possible, which the NVIDIA nForce3 250 chipset supports.

The PCB design is overall good, without any serious drawbacks. Some common problems remain there, though. Such as the installed AGP graphics card blocking the DIMM slot clips. The additional 12V power connector is located in the middle of the mainboard and the attached cable hangs over the CPU cooler. Besides that, the FDD connector is placed before the PCI slots and may cause some problems if you’re installing full-size expansion cards.

The Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 cools the chipset by means of a small passive aluminum heatsink of an intricate design. I should confess that the mainboard was stable with this cooling, although the chipset heats up considerably. That’s why I would recommend that you use active cooling or mount a larger heatsink on the chipset.

Chaintech Zenith ZNF3-250 produces little noise: the 20mm fan from the RadEX system is practically noiseless. You can even turn this fan off altogether, since this would provoke no problems, save for a minor increase of the temperature of the MOSFETs in the CPU voltage regulator unit.