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

Chaintech ZNF3-150: Memory Testing

The ZNF3-150 has 3 memory slots, but they are a bit unique. Slot one can handle up to 1GB of memory, and slots 2 and 3 together can handle an additional 1 GB. Chaintech recommends that memory be placed in slots 1 and 2 or 1 and 3, but not in 2 and 3. We did all testing with 2 sticks of Mushkin 512Mb PC3500 L2 memory in slots 1 and 3 and made no attempt to fill all 3 slots.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

We performed stress tests on the ZNF3-150 in these configurations:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing, conducted by running the FSB at 230 MHz with Mushkin PC3500 L2 at 5:4 memory ratio (DDR368) with 2 x 512MB double-bank DIMMs at 2-2-2-6 timings.
2. Memory stress testing, conducted by running Mushkin PC3500 L2 RAM at 400MHz with all DIMM 1 and 3 filled.

We ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure that the Chaintech ZNF3-150 was absolutely stable at standard DDR400 speed and at overclocked FSB speed. We ran several tasks — data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps like Word and Excel — while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our complete benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The memory stress test is very simple, as it tests the ability of the Chaintech ZNF3-150 to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) at the lowest supported memory timings that our Mushkin PC3500 Level II can achieve:

Stable DDR400 Timings (2/3 banks single-channel populated)
Clock Speed:	200MHz
Timing Mode:	Manual
CAS Latency:	2.0
Bank Interleave:	Auto
RAS to CAS Delay:	2T
RAS Precharge:	6T
Precharge Delay:	2T
Command Rate:	1T

The ZNF3-150 had no problem handling any of the benchmarks or stress tests at 2-2-2-6 memory timings. It is worth mentioning that the “Auto” setting in BIOS set memory timings of 2-3-3-6 with our Mushkin memory. While 2-2-2-6 timings, set manually, did provide slightly better performance, the real difference between Auto 2-3-3-6 and manual 2-2-2-6 timings was extremely small. For most situations, Auto timings will provide excellent stability and speed.