Board analysis

The Zenith FM6P/N Personal Cinema FX 5600

Back of the card

Just because the Zenith FM6P/N is based on NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5600 core doesn’t mean Chaintech can’t dress it up a bit, which is exactly what they’ve done. The board sports a distinctive charcoal black PCB with a massive gold-colored aluminum heatsink that cools the graphics core and memory. The GeForce FX 5600 is a fairly cool graphics core with lower power requirements than other GeForce FX cards, so the cooling solution Chaintech has implemented is definitely overkill, but it certainly looks good.

Zenith logo

Small TV tuner

Above the fan itself is a massive “Z” denoting the Chaintech board’s Zenith branding, Chaintech’s logo is placed at the center. Underneath the Zenith logo lies a blue LED. When combined with the black PCB and gold-plated back plate (including a gold-plated coax connector) the Zenith FM6P/N is certainly one of the sharpest GeForce FX 5600 cards we’ve seen, and would look great inside a system case with a side window.

Taking a closer look at the card, you’ll see the Microtune TV tuner in the upper left corner of the board, which as you can see is significantly smaller than ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 PRO tuner. The tuner itself is digital, whereas ATI now uses analog tuners. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean you’ll receive HDTV signals, rather the circuitry itself is digital rather than analog. While it may be argued that this should result in sharper pictures, keep in mind the poor signal quality of cable television. Chances are your signal isn’t good enough for you to spot the difference.

Gold-plated backplate

Closer look at the heatsink

On the memory side, Chaintech uses 4.0ns memory modules from Samsung, which are officially rated for operation at 250MHz (500MHz effective). This means that Chaintech is technically overclocking the modules on our board, although as many overclockers have found, Samsung’s modules tend to be very good for this task. We did not encounter any stability issues with our board during testing, although we still would’ve liked to have seen Chaintech use Samsung’s K4D261638E-TC36 module. This memory is officially rated for 275MHz.

Accessories

Inside the Zenith FM6P/N box Chaintech includes a ton of goodies. For starters you’ve got an anti-static brush; this can be used for dusting your keyboard (among other places). Chaintech also includes a green Q Ball. This handy device can be used to keep your monitor clean. Other accessories included are the USB RF receiver for the remote control unit, an S-Video cable, composite and audio cables, the aforementioned breakout box, RF remote control unit, and DVI adapter. The software bundle is pretty extensive as well, although the titles are a bit dated. Included are copies of Age of Wonders 2, Serious Sam 2, Rally Trophy, Max Payne, Tropico, MDK2, NVDVD 2.0, WinDVR, Ulead DVD Movie Factory 2.0 SE, Ulead Video Studio 6.0 SE, and 3Deep.

Q-Ball and brush

Chaintech bundles everything well, the packaging is very well done and the 96-page manual offers just enough information to get your feet wet, although like ATI documentation for the supporting software (television viewing/recording, etc) is pretty light.