Physical Design
Physical Design & Layout
The layout and physical design of the Chaintech V915P is very good without any real issues I can see.
The socket area is very well designed and uses low-profile capacitors that are roughly the same height of the socket itself. This means that you don’t want to worry about larger heatsinks colliding with these components during installation.
The Zenith V915P’s socket is clear and uses low-profile capacitors.
We used a Zalman CNPS-7000ACu to check the design of the socket area and as you can see by the pictures this large heatsink has no problems clearing components on the board. One thing worth noting is that older heatsinks designed for Socket 478 (like this CNPS-7000) will likely not work on the Socket T because of the different layout. You will have to get either an adapter or a new heatsink. Luckily for me and for their customers, Zalman has just an adapter for their popular CNPS heatsinks.
The venerable Zalman CNPS7000 with LGA775 adapter.
Speaking of heatsinks, there is a passive cooler on the Northbridge that is held in place by a spring clip. There are no mounting holes around this chip, so aftermarket Northbridge coolers will be hard to mount.
There is a 24-pin ATX power connector located on the front-edge of the motherboard near the RAM. Though the connection has 24-pins, the V915P also supports your traditional 20-pin ATX power connector as long as your power supply has the 4-pin 12V cable.
The location of the IDE header may be in an awkward spot for those of you with larger cases. Because it’s closer to the bottom edge of the board, IDE cables from your 5.25″ drive bays may not be able to reach. So keep in mind that you may have to move your drives to give extra slack or even buy a longer IDE cable (24″ should be sufficient).
Other notable connections on the V915P are the 3 fan headers (one of which is a 4-pin for Intel coolers) and two extra USB pin headers to add another four USB connections to your PC (USB brackets not included).
