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 BIOS:

Chaintech has recently made a good attempt at satisfying the needs of overclockers and enthusiasts by giving lots of options found in the BIOS. Most know that the BIOS is where the overclocking and tweaking takes place. A good set of options can take and average system and turn it into a speed demon.

The PC Health Status menu gives all the details about the system vitals. Here you can check the voltages for the CPU, memory, AGP, chipset, etc. Also you can check temperatures and fan speeds. There is also an option that can be set to shutdown the system when it reaches a specified temperature. We have seen more alarms and options in other BIOSes but there is only one option in the Chaintech BIOS. Maybe in the future the BIOS will be updated with additional options.

The Frequency/Voltage Control menu is where all the overclocking can be done. Options for FSB settings, voltages, and AGP ratios can all be adjusted. The FSB option can go up to 400 and I seriously doubt there will be many hitting that speed with their motherboard, especially since there are no options to lower the multiplier in this BIOS. The voltages for Vcore go up to 1.7V, VDIMM 2.9V, VAGP 2.2V, and chipset up to 1.9V.

Memory timings and clock can be set in the DRAM Configuration menu. There are quite a bit of timings that can be changed. Altering the memory timings can boost the system performance but can also cause system instability if the user does not know what he/she is doing.