Overclocker Cafe - X-Pider Case Review

Chaintech Summit 7NIF2 Mainboard

Layout and Features

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the board layout itself. I'll go over the basic design and then move on to some of the unique features of the board before moving on to the BIOS. The first thing you notice is the size of the board. Being a Micro ATX board, it is quite a bit smaller than other motherboards that we have reviewed here. This is seen immediately with the presence of only 3 PCI slots, but with on-board sound you really don't need any PCI slots. Another quick thing I wish to point out is the layout of the IDE/Floppy channels. Because of the small form factor Chaintech had to place the 3 channels together which makes it somewhat of a pain in the butt if you use both IDE's and the floppy.

A quick look at the back of the board shows the I/O layout. It's a good thing that Chaintech thought to supply us with an extra I/O plate. Because of the onboard video, most standard plates won't work. Sorry about the poor quality of the pic, but I think my camera is on it's last leg. The blue arrow points to the onboard VGA port while the red one is aimed at the TV-Out connector. Also included on the rear is an old style joystick port (that made Dean happy).

You'll notice that there are no serial ports on the rear I/O panel. But if you do have an older device that uses a serial connection (like my digital camera, that should tell you how old it is), Chaintech has got you covered there. On the motherboard itself are two 9 pin connectors for a serial port. All you need is the connector to plug into the board and you're in business.

The 3 DIMM slots are located in the normal position, just to the right of the CPU. While the DIMMs are labeled from 1 to 3, you can place the memory in any slot without regards to order. The motherboard will support up to 3GB of PC3200 memory. But in order to support the dual channel DDR 400, you will need to install a stand alone video card. Not to shabby for a budget board if you ask me.

nForce2 Chipset

Let's take a quick tour of the chipset layout. After requesting it, Chaintech supplied us with a diagram for the chipset itself on the motherboard. This made it much easier to see the relationship that exists between the MCP and IGP chips and what each one of them controls. The diagram is very easy to follow. The MCP chip is located just below the AGP slot with the ICP chip being situated under the cooling fan.

Being a visual kind of guy I do have to add that in my opinion the gold color of the heatsink/fan contrasts very nicely with the black PCB of the motherboard. Even though performance is the main issue here, I just had to throw that in.

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