Chaintech Revamps NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Mainboards

KingFish

Mainboard maker Chaintech said it had made certain improvements to its VNF4 Ultra VE mainboards following critics from X-bit labs web-site, who found certain disadvantages with the mainboard’s design.

Mainboard maker Chaintech said it had made certain improvements to its VNF4 Ultra VE mainboards following critics from X-bit labs web-site, who found certain disadvantages with the mainboard’s design.

In the review entitled “Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra): Can You Have Good Hardware at a Low Price?” X-bit labs analyst Ilya Gavrichenkov wrote that the mainboard lacked active cooler on the media and communication processor, which potentially might cause instabilities.

“The chipset on this mainboard is covered with a passive heatsink of a medium size. Unfortunately, that’s insufficient as we will see later during our tests. The temperature of the chipset got as high as 60-70°C throughout the benchmarking process, which is hardly a normal operational mode for it,” Mr. Gavrichenkov wrote.

Additionally, X-bit labs reviewer criticized a number of BIOS issues the mainboard had, which ehnaces overclocking potential of the product series.

Chaintech informed X-bit labs on Wednesday that all the problems with Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE have been addressed and the new revisions of the mainboard will be equipped with a fan and will employ a new BIOS version.

Way to listen to the people and fix the problems Chaintech. -KF

Source: X-Bit Labs

edcentric

This could be interesting.
Keep eyes open for a review of the rev2

Otto

Great, now it will have an active cooling
I will have to buy passive NB cooler from Zalman and replace it. More money and more work on my side required.

Geeky1

I'm looking at that passive heatsink on the Chaintech board. It's bigger than the Zalman cooler. If that one won't work, the Zalman won't either. I think the guy on Xbit was wrong to bitch about the passive heatsink (especially considering that as far as I saw he made no mention of instability during the testing), and I think Chaintech was wrong to listen to him, since he is obviously incapable of understanding that 60-70*C is perfectly acceptable for a chipset (the intel 810, for example, is spec'd to run at 110*C), and that it will get much hotter than 60-70*C when the fan fails (which it will) on the active heatsink he was apparently so set on having.

The passive cooling was more than sufficient for stock operation, and is going to be far more reliable in the long term than active cooling. Furthermore, anyone that wants to overclock the board can just slap a 40mm fan on the stock passive 'sink and get better cooling than the titchyass little thing Chaintech is putting on the boards now will get them. Way to go guys (both the reviewer and Chaintech).

madmat

I hate to tell you this Geeky but I have a Chaintech W/active cooling on the NB and it's no titchyass bitty little thing. In fact it's so big that I have to remove it and remount it in order to install my video card with the waterblock mounted and it uses a normal 40x40mm square fan which is easily replaced not some oddball fan that's sunken into the cooler which is the norm for most mobo makers these days.

Geeky1

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/news/2005-02/chaintech_nf4u_300.jpg

That's a titchyass little heatsink dude. It's just like the one on the MSI K7D-L except it's gold.

madmat

Maybe so but at least it uses a standard box fan unlike a lot of other mobo makers are using, if and/or when it fails it'll be simple to replace just the fan, no need to even dismount the heatsink.

When I've got use of the camera again I'll get a couple pics of the one on my mobo, it's not huge but it's bigger than most bundled coolers. I can say one positive thing about Chaintech's fan choice, mine ran pretty much non-stop for over a year and never had a problem.