Chaintech ZNF3-150 Zenith (nForce3)

Company: Chaintech
Product: ZNF3-150 Zenith
Street Price: $210
Date Reviewed: November 20, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Chaintech ZNF3-150 Zenith Layout:

There are not many flaws in the layout design for the ZNF3-150. The 20-pin ATX connector is at the top right of the board. This very good placement keeping the large 20-pin cable out of the way of most components. The 4-pin 12V connector is in an awkward position to the bottom left of the CPU socket. The cable could interfere with the CPU heatsink mounting. The floppy and IDE connections are high enough on the mainboard that connecting the cables to the board should be easy even in full tower cases.

Chaintech has decided to go with a 4-phase power system for the ZNF3-150 Zenith. This allows for more consistent and clean power to go to the rest of the system. Cooling the 4-phase power is RadEX, which is somewhat similar to ABIT's OTES. RadEX cools the mosfets because there are heatsinks mounted to the mosfets and a fan which blows over the heatsinks. RadEX may help to obtain higher overclocks but at the least, it keeps the mosfets cool, which are some of the hottest components on the motherboard.

The chipset is cooled by an aluminum heatsink. There is no fan to actively cool the chip but this will reduce system noise. Overclockers generally like having the active cooling solutions but a passive solution works fine for most systems. Also note that there are mounting holes around the chipset so that an aftermarket cooler can be used to cool the nForce 3 chip.

You can see in this picture that the AGP slot is too close to the DIMMS, making the removal of memory impossible without also removing the graphics card. This is a common mistake found on many motherboards, but could have easily been fixed. For people who will not change memory that often, this will not be a big issue.

Chaintech has provided an onboard speaker so that you can hear beeps and beep errors if any. This is a nice addition although most cases do provide a speaker already. A complaint that we have about the front panel connections is that they are not labeled by words or colors. We have seen many boards lately that come with this feature, which makes connecting buttons and LEDs easy. With the ZNF3-150, you will have to refer to the documentation to know how to hook up the cables.