Athlon64 Motherboards: First Look at Chaintech, FIC, and MSI

Chaintech ZNF3-150: Packaging & Board Layout

The foil-faced box is about twice as thick as a regular motherboard box to contain all the extras with the ZNF3-150. The manual and quick setup reference sheet are both very complete and well done.

Layout of the Chaintech is very close to ideal. Placement of IDE/Floppy ports is in the preferred upper right position behind the DIMM slots. The 5 PCI slots are located in the 1 through 5 positions, and yet clearance was considered. The AGP and DIMM slots do not interfere with each other, so upgrading or adding memory is very easy. There are 2 areas, however, that could be improved. First, the location of the 12V 4-pin power cable to the left of the CPU and about midline of the board requires careful routing of the cable to not disturb the CPU. It would be better if it were higher on the board, near the top edge. Also, the dedicated multimedia card draws mixed reviews. The concept is great, but the location at the very bottom left of the motherboard makes feeding any connectors from optical drives difficult at best. You will likely need an extension if you want to connect the output from your optical directly to the Multimedia card. Other than those 2 areas, the board is well laid-out and shows careful attention to detail.

A full selection of round IDE cables, floppy cables and matching SATA cables are provided.

The included Cbox3 fits in a 5-1/4” front bay and provides USB, firewire, SmartDoc system temperature readouts, front audio connectors, and slots for reading a variety of flash cards from your digital equipment.

The multimedia riser card includes a full variety of input/output ports and speaker connections for the on-board 24-bit Envy audio.