Bundle:

Bundled with the VNF3-250 is:

  • 1 VNF3-250 motherboard
  • 1 CNR audio riser card
  • 2 SATA cables
  • 1 Dual SATA power adapter
  • 1 IDE cable
  • 1 FDD cable
  • 1 I/O shield backplate
  • 1 Driver CD
  • 1 Utilities CD
  • 1 manual
  • 1 pack of thermal paste

Chaintech is known for bundling useful accessories with their products, and with the VNF3-250, it's no different. Most manufacturers will supply you with SATA cables, but not the power adapters for your SATA hard drives. Unless you buy your hard drives retail, you won't have any way of powering your SATA drives. It's nice to see a company that thinks ahead.

I don't really understand why Chaintech included the thermal paste with the motherboard unless they intended it for the processor, however, most heat sink companies supply some thermal paste with their product. This isn't a bad thing, just a confusing one. In any case, it's always good to have some thermal paste handy.

First Impressions

My first impressions of this motherboard is that it was oddly layed out. The ATX power connector was situated at the top of the motherboard, which may cause some problems with tight cases and larger heatsinks. I'm used to seeing the CPU fan connector there, which would be logical location for it. However, it was located at the lower left of the CPU heatsink mounting bracket. You can also note that there is no fan on the chipset itself. This may be alright for mainstream use, but if you want to overclock your system, you'll have to add a fan to it.

One thing I noticed that isn't much of an issue, but more of an annoyance was the discovery of some tissue like material sandwhiched between the board and the CPU heatsink mounting bracket. It shouldn't cause any issue, but takes away from the professionality of the motherboard.

Moving a little further down from the CPU socket, you can find two SATA connectors. Then, with a little more searching and you can find the pin out for 2 more SATA connectors located at the lower right of the motherboard.

Controling the 10/100 Mbps network card imbeded on this motherboard is a Realtek RTL8100C chip. Here are some of the specifications for this chip off of Realtek's site:

    • 128-pin PQFP/LQFP (PQFP package pin-to-pin compatible with Realtek RTL8110S-32 Single-Chip Gigabit Ethernet Controller)
    • Supports PCI/mini-PCI interfaces
    • Integrates Fast Ethernet MAC, physical chip, and transceiver onto a single chip
    • 10Mbps and 100Mbps operation
    • Supports 10Mbps and 100Mbps N-way auto-negotiation
    • Supports 25MHz Crystal or 25MHz OSC as the internal clock source
    • Complies with PC99/PC2001 standards
    • Supports ACPI power management
    • Provides PCI bus master data transfer
    • Provides PCI memory space or I/O space mapped data transfer
    • Supports PCI clock speed of 16.75MHz-40MHz
    • Advanced power saving mode
    • Supports Wake-on-LAN and remote wake-up (AMD Magic Packet™, Link Change, and Microsoft® Wake-up frame)
    • Half/Full duplex capability
    • Supports Full Duplex Flow Control (IEEE 802.3x)
    • Provides interface to 93C46 EEPROM to store resource configuration and ID parameters
    • Provides PCI clock run pin
    • Provides LED pins for network operation status indication
    • 2.5/3.3V power supply with 5V tolerant I/Os
    • 0.25µm CMOS process

More details can be found on the RTL8100C product page.

Moving to the back plate now, we notice the standard PS/2 ports, 2 serial ports, and 1 parallel port. Usually we'd see a network port right under the PS/2 ports next to the top two USB 2.0 ports. However on the VNF3-250 it's next to the two lower USB 2.0 ports. And finally on the bottom, the audio ports for the integrated sound. Of course, the supplied I/O backplate will have to be used since this is a non-standard configuration.

Finally when examining the manual, I found some pages were not relevant to the specific motherboard but applied more to the bigger brother, the ZNF3-250. As well some of the information was vague at best. Personally I feel that there could have been more work done on the manual. Manuals are useful, especially for those who are building their first computer.