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Overclocking

Overclocking on the VNF4 was a very pleasant surprise after some initial frustration. There were a couple oddities I did run into and the first is a serious one; leaving the HT bus on Auto and raising the FSB to 240+ is not a good idea as the Windows registry ended up getting corrupted a couple times resulting in the a need to reinstall Windows. I do not know if this is an issue on other nForce 4 boards but this should not happen. Dropping the HT bus seems to remedy the issue however. The second is the real clockrate of the processor tends reported by the main POST screen tends to get very off - for example, the processor running at 5 x 400Mhz was being incorrectly reported at ~500Mhz.

The registry corruption led me to be a bit wary about the overclocking abilities of the board but it looks like my concerns were unfounded. We have a good idea where our processor limits are as far as maximum clockspeed goes. To isolate how far the board itself can go, we take the processor out of the equation and see how far we can take the processor bus. Overclocking is a combination of the processor limits and board limits, in the case of the Athlon 64, it is limit of the processor bus.

The processor bus was steadily pushed to the 300 Mhz mark with no hiccups. The Chaintech board then started hitting DFI territory in the 360 range but pressed on still. We were in fact able to push the processor bus all the way up to 400 Mhz and the Chaintech held up under Prime95 for roughly 19 hours before we called it a day.

Conclusions

With a street price of roughly 142$ Canadian (and alternatively, 89$ US), Chaintech's VNF4 Zenith Value Edition is a good alternative to some of the other cheaper boards at this price point as the feature rich nForce 4 board is arguably a better solution than VIA's K8T890 though benchmarks have the two platforms fairly equal. The low price point does means that there are very few extras included - like with the Gigabyte K8VT890-9 Chaintech includes enough to get started but does not attempt to throw in any extra value added items.

The board layout for the VNF4 is fairly good. The only oddity is the placement of the ATX header which is awkwardly on the left side of the board. The three legacy PCI slots is a good thing seeing as how there is still a lack of PCIe x1 components. A few more USB2 ports on the back would have been a good thing also, as the four there will get filled up pretty quickly even by the casual end user.

On the benchmark side of things, it was a bit more mixed. The VNF4 is not always the fastest and in the last series of benchmarks it lagged behind the leaders steadily by roughly 2% but performance in more office oriented applications were consistently very good.

For the enthusiast, the Chaintech ran up a new record in our lab as far as the processor bus is concerned and maxed out at a full 400 Mhz. A couple areas of improvement would be more memory timing options and making more dividers available to the end user. Processor voltages are quite good but the memory voltages are on the conservative side. The board itself seems to be capable of a lot and if Chaintech is more aggressive on what is exposed in the BIOS this could be the budget enthusiast board to get.

At only a few dollars more than the budget Gigabyte GA-K8VT890-9, the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra is an absolute steal for the enthusiast on a budget and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a scorcher for overclocking that bests even DFI's nF4 when it comes to pushing the processor bus.