The Motherboard - Continued
The motherboard itself is obviously a µATX motherboard, and as such only sports a 1/3 (AGP/PCI) configuration for slots. The AGP slot is an 8X compatible one, and works well with the MX 440 8X previously tested. The location of the IDE ports was adaquate with the ports actually being located near where they would normally be on a full ATX board. The three RAM slots are also located in their standard positions with the first two used to enable the single channel mode and the single DIMM slot used for Dual Channel mode.
The location of the ATX power connector is in one of my least favorite positions, as it located above the CPU socket, so that you have to route the power supply cable around the CPU heatsink. This location of the ATX power connector is common in most boards with only a few exceptions existing. The two fan headers avaliable are located in opposite positions, with one being just above the CPU socket and the other being right near the IDE connectors, with the only other connector powering the IGP's fan/heatsink combination.
The heatsink fan that was put on the IGP was much like that found on low to mid end video cards as the cooler. The fan itself blows over a solid piece of aluminum with the fins of the heatsink only existing on the outside of the heatsink. This doesn't really allow for a great amount of heat transfer, but it does save in height of the cooler as you don't have two levels, fins and fan. Upon taking off the heatsink I was expecting to see a TIM or even a small dab of thermal paste, but to my surprise I found that there was no material to help thermal transfer between the IGP and the heatsink. I therefore put some thermal paste on and put the heatsink, which uses spring pins, back on the IGP.
The IGP underneath the heatsink is a A3 stepping of the nForce 2 IGP and was made fairly recently, which means most of the bugs, if any, have been worked out. The 'southbridge' is the MCP not the MCP-T, which has support for Dual LAN and firewire. The MCP is still a good controller as it still has an integrated LAN controller and support for USB2 and ATA133. Though it doesn't have support for the extra features of the MCP-T this is still a good amount of features to be included in this small board.
The back I/O panel is somewhat different from that of the standard ATX back plate. First we notice that the USB ports have moved from their location right beside the PS/2 ports, and have moved along with the network connector to the other end of the panel. Both serial ports are gone, replaced with the VGA port and the SVHS connector. Chaintech helpfully provides a back plate connector so that you can use all these pieces.
The CPU socket came with a nice little warning sticker on it, which tells you to make sure that the heatsink is actually on properly, which is a good reminder for all, and especially the beginner system builder. Also looking at the CPU socket we see that there is the actual 4 holes around the socket for heatsinks or for some water-cooling setups. The area around the CPU socket is a good amount though on the front of the socket there isn't a lot of clearance between the socket and the capacitors and the IGP heatsink, as you can see above.
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Chaintech 7NIF2 nForce 2: We take a look at Chaintech's latest nForce 2 implementation, the 7NIF2. The board not only features the nVidia IGP, but it's also based on the Micro-ATX form factor.
