With fairly generic specs for the most part, the Pine ZA3 hammers home the fact that while buyers may not be overwhelmed with features, they aren't being forced to give up a King's ransom for the board either. At $65 it's rare to find any mainboard with the pedigree or reliability that the Pine ZA3 provides, most of the low end of the mainboard market is filled with names of which neither you nor we have ever heard.

One area not mentioned on the spec sheet comes in the form of the ZA3's jumperless CPU setup BIOS routine. It's fairly similar to the horde of other jumperless routines we've seen since Abit brought the concept to the mainstream two years ago. The ZA3 is not totally jumperless however, users will have to enable/disable a lone jumper that controls the CPU's operation at 66 or 100MHz.

As with the 440BX and 440ZX boards we've tested over the past year, the Pine ZA3 performs well in our system-level benchmarking utilities.

Buyers won't find any nasty surprises with the ZA3's performance, again the reference to a Honda Civic comes to mind.

While not being one of the main focuses of the ZA3, overclocking is still very possible through the use of the fairly standard 75MHz and 83MHz front side bus speeds.

Truthfully we'd recommend Abit's ZM6 440ZX board (or Abit's BM6 440BX board for that matter) over the ZA3 for Socket370 architecture buyers seeking to seriously overclock their CPUs. Abit's variable voltage and enhanced front side bus speed support make it the overclocker's first true choice.

Those looking just to experiment with light CPU overclocking however will find the 75MHz and 83MHz settings on the ZA3 up to the task. We encountered no problems using three different PPGA Socket370 CPUs on the ZA3, a testament to its stability.