Pine Technology ZA3 i440ZX Socket-370

The Bad

Thanks to limitations of the ZX chipset, only 2 DIMM slots are available and memory expansion could become an issue. Make sure you buy as much RAM as you can the first time - you'll only have one shot to upgrade without throwing away some old RAM.

The board came set with the 100MHz FSB setting forced, so that AnandTech's test bed Celeron 366 would not even boot. Further, the jumper is incorrectly labeled in the manual so trial and error was required to get a 66MHz FSB speed. Speaking of FSB speeds, the "jumperless setup" is not completely jumperless, at least not for overclockers thanks to that B21 jumper. No speeds above 83MHz are available without forcing 100MHz via the incorrectly labeled jumper.

The BIOS offers no provision for manually assigning an IRQ to a particular PCI slot. The option to disable the USB IRQ is also missing. No hardware monitoring support at all. ATX power connector blocks air flow to CPU. General stability is a bit below average and overclocked stability was even worse, especially the 83MHz setting.

Power management support is also lacking. ACPI is not supported, which is already quite useful under Windows 98 and will become even more important under Windows 2000. Wake-on-LAN is supported in the BIOS but the header is not available.

The manual is virtually useless with little information for the first time system builder or the advanced user. It is a generic manual that covers eight different boards in little detail. No information on how to install a motherboard is included and only a brief explanations of BIOS settings.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS.: No

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS.: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com