Chaintech ZNF3-250 Zenith

Introduction.

The past year has seen a very rare phenomenon in the world of the PC; the extension of the x86 architecture bitwise up from a previous standard. We last saw this back in 1985 with the introduction of the i386 which moved the humble PC from being a 16 bit machine up to a 32 bit machine. In nearly 20 years, the PC has remained a 32 bit only design until late 2003 when AMD introduced it’s new 64 bit AMD64 architecture, first with the server oriented Opteron and later with the Athlon 64 and Athlon FX designs.

Whilst Intel and AMD’s PC platform designs have been diverging since 1997, the Athlon 64 marked the first time when AMD clearly made headway with it’s own unique design. With this, came a whole raft of new motherboard designs to support two new designs of CPU.

The first of these is the now already superseded Socket 940 architecture. This is designed to support the Server based Opteron, but was used in PCs to support the premium market Athlon FX processor. At the PC level we have already seen the Socket 940 architecture be superseded by the new Socket 939 design, and so we can regard this as a dead-end for anything below the target market for the Opteron.

In the more mainstream market AMD chose to position the Athlon 64 CPU. This used a smaller Socket design in the shape of Socket 754. As the name implies this socket only features 754 pin connectors as opposed to 940 pins (or 939 pins). This is due to initial Athlon 64 CPUs only featuring support for a single-channel integrated memory controller, as opposed to the more complex dual-channel integrated memory controller as found on the Athlon FX and Opteron processors. AMD will also move the Athlon 64 to it’s new Socket 939 architecture, but that is not so say Socket 754 does not have a future.

In fact Socket 754 forms an integral part of AMD’s strategy going forward. Athlon 64 designs will be supported up to XP 3700+ and after that future 32-bit Athlon XP designs will use this new socket.

The board which we have for this review is from Chaintech. From it’s Zenith family, the ZNF3-250 is aimed at the high-end of the Athlon 64's target market and is designed to carry plenty of features to keep the PC enthusiast occupied.

Like many high-end AMD design systems of the past 18 months, the ZNF3-250 comes equipped with an Nvidia designed chipset in the shape of the Nforce 3-250. This has already superseded the original Nforce 3-150 Athlon 64 design and now features support memoery in excess of 4GB RAM.

To see how the ZNF3-250 fared, read on...

Specifications.