- Jan 12, 2001
- 1,405
- 7
- 81
PREFACE
I ordered this board in late December and as of today, have had 8 days with it. Here are my experiences, likes, dislikes, problems, and solutions. I haven't punched out a motherboard review in years since my work with 3DRAGE.com (now dust in the wind) but I'm certain I can cover everything.
Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Hands-On Review
I'll begin with my immediate opinion of this board. Chaintech has failed to win me over with this product, and I would not recommend it to people simply because in the past, I have had flawless motherboards. Companies like Gigabyte have won me over from the likes of Asus for stability king, and Abit has won me over recently from MSI as overclocking king (actually I was a Abit fan up until the KT133A/686B southbridge issue with HD corruption where I lost close to 200GB of unedited video data...but it'd be worse if it was something valuable like pr0n.)
Anyway, to the point, this board was not a flawless installation, is not a good overclocker, and has varying network controller issues. Lastly, the included packaging and contents leave a lot to be desired.
No user manual is included with the current retail packaging, and to make it worse the online PDF doesn't explain very much about BIOS settings and what certain things do.
UPDATE 1/9/05 Reports indicate user manuals matching the online PDF (linked below) in content have been included with shipping products verified as early as 1/7/05.
On a better note, this board is built very well, such as the quality of the PCB, the choice of high(er) quality capacitors (although they are not all matching manufactures) and a decent but not great layout. It has all the bells most nForce4 boards have, simply lacking IEEE1394 (no big deal if you have a Audigy2 card like me) and a second NIC that I have never used in the past (ala Asus A7N8X Deluxe.) Both 'missing features' are moot points. All the goodies are their, such as 10 USB ports, PCE-e 16x and 3 1x slots, and 3 PCI slots. 4 DIMM slots which I have tested in dual, dual channel mode (all 4 dimm slots filled) proved to be stable at stock speed and rated latency.
The PCB is dark brown, almost black, resembling older ECS boards (ala K7S5A, exc) hinting this PCB and possibly the board may be built by ECS/PC Chips. This is no surprise, as Anandtech discovered on a tour of the ECS facilities last year that ECS actually produces nearly a dozen manufacturers boards and they output millions of square feet of PCB every year. Last to mention on this topic is the capacitors. They are not matching, a common ECS trait. We have two different brands here, however, both are Japanese, at least on my board.
---
On to the installation.
VNF4 Installed
Initially the board installed flawlessly. A lot of people have expressed concerns about power supplies and wether they need a ATX 2.01 PSU. This is not required for any current nForce board. A lot of people have also stated they will simply convert the 20-pin ATX connector to the 24-pin ATX 2.01 connector (EPS12V) used on current nForce4 boards.
I RECOMMEND NOT USING A 24-PIN ADAPTER
You may find yourself with a dead board as the 20-24 pin convertor I used destroyed my first board leaving me to believe either a) my convertor was for EPS motherboards which theoretically should be the same as ATX 2.01 but are NOT or b) the power supply I have, a Soyo Raptor, a standard ATX 2.0 power supply with SATA and 5V & 12V connectors does not have correct current to have it split with a connector and deliver stable output to a motherboard.
I am still researching to this day why the first board failed, but it failed immediately after adding a dreaded ATX20-24 PIN convertor cable pictured here.
The second difficult task was loading the SATA drivers into the WinXP installation process to install onto a SATA array (wether it be one drive or more, it MUST be done in a certain order.) Luckily, the online PDF provided from Chaintech at the below address proved to be useful.
Chaintech VNF4 Homepage - Click MANUAL on right to download
What was stated is to load the SATA driver then the Array Driver (two seperate drivers) in that order from a floppy disk with your install inf files in the root directory along with drivers. Essentially, copy the contents of the WinXP directory on the included drivers CD to a floppy, press F6 during WinXP install boot (this apply's to any WinNT-based OS, such as Win2K or Win2K3 Server) and load the drivers that are found in that order.
Ok, so Windows is installed. Time to run Prime.
Torture Test ran 1 day, 6 hours, 34 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Not bad, I was happy.
Overclocking proved to be less than pleasing. I have 2 Mushkin PC3500 LVL2 in dual channel, and I was able to hit 230MHz-2-2-2-6 with this memory on my Abit NF7S nForce2 with a Barton 2400+ Mobile CPU with complete Prime95 stability. No issues.
On the VNF4 I hit 215MHz, anything more (such as 217MHz, the PC3500 DDR spec) returned failed Prime95 tests within MINUTES.
UPDATE This problem has been investigated by MajorPayne:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...9&threadid=1484167
It turns out Chaintech forgot to explain what the HT settings are and how they work in their online PDF manual. I have confirmed that dropping the HT setting to 4X not only improves overclocking potential, but yeilds virtually NO loss in performance from memory, cpu or hard disks. My 3DMARK05 points were affected by 11 points, and we're talking 4000 points here.
Another issue regarding the nForce4 gigabit NIC is discused below:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...9&threadid=1478789
This issue involved a random connection drop by the NIC. It is not software related and is likely a power delivery flaw in the Chaintech design, or possibly a bad capacitor disrupting power somewhere. Who knows. What we do know, is that it is power related, because unpluging the PSU for a few minutes and rebooting the system DOES work. Whats mroe fustrating is not all of these Chaintech VNF4 boards have these issues. My first board, for example, had this problem. My second, however, had an entirely different problem (less severe) and I have YET to find a perfect solution for it.
My current (second) board is on my Gigabit LAN like my first. You will see in the above thread that I am discussing a problem with connectivity performance and latency issues. SiSoft Sandra's network test takes about a minute to complete when I speedtest to other LAN computers from my VNF4 system which all have DLINK PCI Gigabit NICS. Those systems speedtest to eachother fine(within 3 seconds), but also lag about a minute on results FROM the VNF4 system. My first VNF4 didn't have this problem. To make matters worse, as if latency issues wern't enough, raw throughput was 19MB/sec, consistently. My DLINK NIC's in my other systems, which are PCI, hit 46MB/sec consistently.
UPDATE I found a driver package of nForce4 drivers at the below site that seem to have solved my network lag issues. As of this writing my latency is 3ms and throughput is 56MB/sec.
MSI Download Page
Please note that the only driver I used from this distribution was the network driver. I uninstalled the Chaintech supplied network driver and installed just this network driver. I would NOT recommend installing any other drivers as they *may* be MSI specific. Who knows. I didn't test it, I recommend you don't either.
Now that we got all the B.S. out of the way, on to performance.
Synthetic performance is impressive. Comparing things such as memory benchmarks in Sandra to other typical systems (such as Opteron and P4) the Chaintech/nForce4 sits on top, and I mean it is UNBEATEN. 6GB/sec of DDR memory access performance @ 200MHz FSB at 2-2-2-10* (Anandtech recommends running 10T timing on ALL Athlon64/FX/Opteron processors, it has to do with the internal memory controller 'liking' this timing more than others.)
When pushed harder, to 217MHz FSB, I get 6379MB/sec memory read/access/write average. Impressive, unbeaten, but right in line with other nForce4-based motherboards.
Other performance, such as 3DMARK05, is also inline with other nForce4 systems. No better, no worse, with the exception of the MSI nForce4 board recently reviewed by T-Break I believe. I briefed their review, and it scored poorly in video benchmarks, which leave to be believe it is a driver problem, possibly WITH THE DRIVER PACKAGE ABOVE. Again, I recommend JUST using the network drivers :roll:
So, I hope this helps anyone who has this board with any problems they're having. If you can't tell from the picture, I have the following specifications, and although clearance around the CPU socket looks tight, I was able to fit a large TT cooler on their which keeps the CPU right above room temperature when idle.
Congrats to AMD for such a masterpiece of a processor. The 90nm 3200+ is astonishing. Too bad the current nForce4 boards don't give it much to show for in terms of quality and price, as many of these boards exceed the cost of the CPU itself, and really are not anything to write home about...
...at least I know I wont be writing home about it, just here.
Tim Williams
Chaintech Zenith VNF4 nForce4
2x512 Mushkin Black PC3500 LVL2
2x80GB Seagate 7200.7 RAID 0
XFX nVidia GeForce 6600GT w/ 1.6ns (overclocks very well, 540/1210 w/ 7v fan resistor ~30dB output)
Audigy2 ZS PCI
Teac 16X DVD_DL IDE Burner
CoolerMaster Praetorian
4x80MM Speeze 28dB@26CFM Fans & 15-watt Rheostat running at 6.7v output)
Soyo Raptor 450-Watt Power Supply w/ 120MM Panaflow FB (Japan) Swap
ThermalTake Silencer K8 Cooler ~26dB (fits this mobo quite well, easy on, easy off)
Overall, quiet, cool and fast.
Please post your opinions and results for others to learn from below, this is an official, unofficial thread on AT for the Chaintech Zenith VNF4 nForce4 PCIe Motherboard
I ordered this board in late December and as of today, have had 8 days with it. Here are my experiences, likes, dislikes, problems, and solutions. I haven't punched out a motherboard review in years since my work with 3DRAGE.com (now dust in the wind) but I'm certain I can cover everything.
Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Hands-On Review
I'll begin with my immediate opinion of this board. Chaintech has failed to win me over with this product, and I would not recommend it to people simply because in the past, I have had flawless motherboards. Companies like Gigabyte have won me over from the likes of Asus for stability king, and Abit has won me over recently from MSI as overclocking king (actually I was a Abit fan up until the KT133A/686B southbridge issue with HD corruption where I lost close to 200GB of unedited video data...but it'd be worse if it was something valuable like pr0n.)
Anyway, to the point, this board was not a flawless installation, is not a good overclocker, and has varying network controller issues. Lastly, the included packaging and contents leave a lot to be desired.
No user manual is included with the current retail packaging, and to make it worse the online PDF doesn't explain very much about BIOS settings and what certain things do.
UPDATE 1/9/05 Reports indicate user manuals matching the online PDF (linked below) in content have been included with shipping products verified as early as 1/7/05.
On a better note, this board is built very well, such as the quality of the PCB, the choice of high(er) quality capacitors (although they are not all matching manufactures) and a decent but not great layout. It has all the bells most nForce4 boards have, simply lacking IEEE1394 (no big deal if you have a Audigy2 card like me) and a second NIC that I have never used in the past (ala Asus A7N8X Deluxe.) Both 'missing features' are moot points. All the goodies are their, such as 10 USB ports, PCE-e 16x and 3 1x slots, and 3 PCI slots. 4 DIMM slots which I have tested in dual, dual channel mode (all 4 dimm slots filled) proved to be stable at stock speed and rated latency.
The PCB is dark brown, almost black, resembling older ECS boards (ala K7S5A, exc) hinting this PCB and possibly the board may be built by ECS/PC Chips. This is no surprise, as Anandtech discovered on a tour of the ECS facilities last year that ECS actually produces nearly a dozen manufacturers boards and they output millions of square feet of PCB every year. Last to mention on this topic is the capacitors. They are not matching, a common ECS trait. We have two different brands here, however, both are Japanese, at least on my board.
---
On to the installation.
VNF4 Installed
Initially the board installed flawlessly. A lot of people have expressed concerns about power supplies and wether they need a ATX 2.01 PSU. This is not required for any current nForce board. A lot of people have also stated they will simply convert the 20-pin ATX connector to the 24-pin ATX 2.01 connector (EPS12V) used on current nForce4 boards.
I RECOMMEND NOT USING A 24-PIN ADAPTER
You may find yourself with a dead board as the 20-24 pin convertor I used destroyed my first board leaving me to believe either a) my convertor was for EPS motherboards which theoretically should be the same as ATX 2.01 but are NOT or b) the power supply I have, a Soyo Raptor, a standard ATX 2.0 power supply with SATA and 5V & 12V connectors does not have correct current to have it split with a connector and deliver stable output to a motherboard.
I am still researching to this day why the first board failed, but it failed immediately after adding a dreaded ATX20-24 PIN convertor cable pictured here.
The second difficult task was loading the SATA drivers into the WinXP installation process to install onto a SATA array (wether it be one drive or more, it MUST be done in a certain order.) Luckily, the online PDF provided from Chaintech at the below address proved to be useful.
Chaintech VNF4 Homepage - Click MANUAL on right to download
What was stated is to load the SATA driver then the Array Driver (two seperate drivers) in that order from a floppy disk with your install inf files in the root directory along with drivers. Essentially, copy the contents of the WinXP directory on the included drivers CD to a floppy, press F6 during WinXP install boot (this apply's to any WinNT-based OS, such as Win2K or Win2K3 Server) and load the drivers that are found in that order.
Ok, so Windows is installed. Time to run Prime.
Torture Test ran 1 day, 6 hours, 34 minutes - 0 errors, 0 warnings.
Not bad, I was happy.
Overclocking proved to be less than pleasing. I have 2 Mushkin PC3500 LVL2 in dual channel, and I was able to hit 230MHz-2-2-2-6 with this memory on my Abit NF7S nForce2 with a Barton 2400+ Mobile CPU with complete Prime95 stability. No issues.
On the VNF4 I hit 215MHz, anything more (such as 217MHz, the PC3500 DDR spec) returned failed Prime95 tests within MINUTES.
UPDATE This problem has been investigated by MajorPayne:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...9&threadid=1484167
It turns out Chaintech forgot to explain what the HT settings are and how they work in their online PDF manual. I have confirmed that dropping the HT setting to 4X not only improves overclocking potential, but yeilds virtually NO loss in performance from memory, cpu or hard disks. My 3DMARK05 points were affected by 11 points, and we're talking 4000 points here.
Another issue regarding the nForce4 gigabit NIC is discused below:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...9&threadid=1478789
This issue involved a random connection drop by the NIC. It is not software related and is likely a power delivery flaw in the Chaintech design, or possibly a bad capacitor disrupting power somewhere. Who knows. What we do know, is that it is power related, because unpluging the PSU for a few minutes and rebooting the system DOES work. Whats mroe fustrating is not all of these Chaintech VNF4 boards have these issues. My first board, for example, had this problem. My second, however, had an entirely different problem (less severe) and I have YET to find a perfect solution for it.
My current (second) board is on my Gigabit LAN like my first. You will see in the above thread that I am discussing a problem with connectivity performance and latency issues. SiSoft Sandra's network test takes about a minute to complete when I speedtest to other LAN computers from my VNF4 system which all have DLINK PCI Gigabit NICS. Those systems speedtest to eachother fine(within 3 seconds), but also lag about a minute on results FROM the VNF4 system. My first VNF4 didn't have this problem. To make matters worse, as if latency issues wern't enough, raw throughput was 19MB/sec, consistently. My DLINK NIC's in my other systems, which are PCI, hit 46MB/sec consistently.
UPDATE I found a driver package of nForce4 drivers at the below site that seem to have solved my network lag issues. As of this writing my latency is 3ms and throughput is 56MB/sec.
MSI Download Page
Please note that the only driver I used from this distribution was the network driver. I uninstalled the Chaintech supplied network driver and installed just this network driver. I would NOT recommend installing any other drivers as they *may* be MSI specific. Who knows. I didn't test it, I recommend you don't either.
Now that we got all the B.S. out of the way, on to performance.
Synthetic performance is impressive. Comparing things such as memory benchmarks in Sandra to other typical systems (such as Opteron and P4) the Chaintech/nForce4 sits on top, and I mean it is UNBEATEN. 6GB/sec of DDR memory access performance @ 200MHz FSB at 2-2-2-10* (Anandtech recommends running 10T timing on ALL Athlon64/FX/Opteron processors, it has to do with the internal memory controller 'liking' this timing more than others.)
When pushed harder, to 217MHz FSB, I get 6379MB/sec memory read/access/write average. Impressive, unbeaten, but right in line with other nForce4-based motherboards.
Other performance, such as 3DMARK05, is also inline with other nForce4 systems. No better, no worse, with the exception of the MSI nForce4 board recently reviewed by T-Break I believe. I briefed their review, and it scored poorly in video benchmarks, which leave to be believe it is a driver problem, possibly WITH THE DRIVER PACKAGE ABOVE. Again, I recommend JUST using the network drivers :roll:
So, I hope this helps anyone who has this board with any problems they're having. If you can't tell from the picture, I have the following specifications, and although clearance around the CPU socket looks tight, I was able to fit a large TT cooler on their which keeps the CPU right above room temperature when idle.
Congrats to AMD for such a masterpiece of a processor. The 90nm 3200+ is astonishing. Too bad the current nForce4 boards don't give it much to show for in terms of quality and price, as many of these boards exceed the cost of the CPU itself, and really are not anything to write home about...
...at least I know I wont be writing home about it, just here.
Tim Williams
Chaintech Zenith VNF4 nForce4
2x512 Mushkin Black PC3500 LVL2
2x80GB Seagate 7200.7 RAID 0
XFX nVidia GeForce 6600GT w/ 1.6ns (overclocks very well, 540/1210 w/ 7v fan resistor ~30dB output)
Audigy2 ZS PCI
Teac 16X DVD_DL IDE Burner
CoolerMaster Praetorian
4x80MM Speeze 28dB@26CFM Fans & 15-watt Rheostat running at 6.7v output)
Soyo Raptor 450-Watt Power Supply w/ 120MM Panaflow FB (Japan) Swap
ThermalTake Silencer K8 Cooler ~26dB (fits this mobo quite well, easy on, easy off)
Overall, quiet, cool and fast.
Please post your opinions and results for others to learn from below, this is an official, unofficial thread on AT for the Chaintech Zenith VNF4 nForce4 PCIe Motherboard
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