Overclocker Cafe - Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Zenith VE

Chaintech VNF4 Ultra Zenith VE

Installation

We encountered a few issues during the installation of the VNF4. Most of these were centered around the design and layout of the motherboard. The placement of both the 24-pin and 4-pin power connectors left little room for cable management. We tried with several different PSU's and cases and found that unless your power supply has longer than normal cables then the 24-pin connector would be sitting directly above the CPU and heatsink, causing issues with the airflow. With longer cables, like those on the Enermax 460W power supply, they can be routed out of the way with a bit of patience and a few cable ties. The same goes with the 4-pin connector.

Our test bed included our HIS X800XL IceQ VGA card. Due to it's length and the placement of the chipset heatsink, the card and the heatsink were practically touching one another. The real issue will come into play if you use a silent heatsink solution such as a sandwich cooler.

Testing

We're going to run Chaintech's VNF4 Ultra through our benchmarking gamut along with the recently reviewed Foxconn NF4K8MC motherboard, which is also powered by the nForce 4 chipset, though not an ultra.

Test Setup

Chaintech VNF4 Ultra/Foxconn NF4K8MC
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939
1GB Corsair PC3200 XL
80GB Hitachi SATA HDD
Generic CD-Rom
Enermax 460W PSU
Windows XP SP2

Benchmarks:

PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004
PC Magazine Content Creation 2004
SiSoft Sandra 2004
Memory Bandwidth
CPU Multimedia
CPU Arithmetic
File System Benchmark
Far Cry
Doom III

Let's get things going with PC Magazine's Business Winstone and Content Creation 2004. Business Winstone uses various office and business applications to measure a system's performance while Content Creation will use multimedia and graphic applications.

While it seems that the boards flip flopped with the lead, the margin of difference is extremely small. Remember, that we run each benchmark five times and average the scores. It's highly unlikely one would notice any difference while actually using any of the programs that these benchmarks utilize.

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