Pine Technology ZA3 i440ZX Socket-370

Seven 1000uF capacitors are located between the ATX power connector and the CPU socket with a five more around the DIMM slots. The i443ZX chip is covered with an interesting heatsink that is about 50% larger than most heatsinks in width. Interestingly enough, that heatsink is actually attached via two screws from the bottom of the board. Two fan connectors are included on the board - one next to the CPU socket, and one in front of the DIMM slots. An LED in the lower left corner indicates power. The front panel connectors are spaced out at the front of the board such that the power button and hard drive LED connectors are all alone and easy to get to. Keylock, speaker, and reset are a little tougher to get to - similar to most boards out there.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the jumperless bandwagon these days and Pine is no exception. The ZA3 is not completely jumperless, but is pretty close with just a single jumper for toggling the state of B21. Bus speeds and multipliers can be selected in the BIOS under "CPU Speed Settings" but only 66, 75, and 83 are available for users of 66MHz CPU's. If the onboard jumper that forces 100MHz operation is used, 100MHz and above settings become available. AnandTech's test CPU, and Intel Celeron 366, would not boot at 5.5x100MHz=550MHz and thus 100MHz and above operation could not be verified.

The BIOS also suggests some minimal performance enhancing settings such as a recommendation to select CAS 2 upon boot. Otherwise, the BIOS is pretty much the generic Award setup with few added or special features.

Performance was average, not a surprise these days where most motherboards perform within a few percentage points of each other. Non-overclocked stability, on the other hand, was slightly below average, while overclocking fared even worse.

A CD is included with drivers for everything Pine makes, but nothing more - no manuals or useful utilities on there. The manual is also fairly weak and generic - it includes information on eight different Pine motherboards. While they are largely similar, it would be nice to have more detail on each board - not to mention the fact that there were a number of errors in the manual, including which jumper controlled the state of B21.