Chaintech 7NJS Zenith

Company: Chaintech
Product: 7NJS Zenith Motherboard
Street Price: ~$160 USD
Date Reviewed: April 16, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (9.6/10)

Basic Features:

First starting with the board’s I/O configuration it has two PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, two serial ports, one parallel port, a game port, audio line in, line out, and microphone jacks, 10/100 M LAN port, and two USB ports.

The 7NJS Zenith features serial ATA that is becoming a standard on most motherboards. The Promise PDC20376 controller supports two serial ATA ports and one Ultra DMA port with RAID 0/1. This is will be especially useful now that we are seeing more and more serial ATA drive being released from manufacturers like Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate.

The CMedia 8738, which supports 6-channel audio, and SPDIF provide sound on the board. Along with the audio, the board also supports USB 2.0 (up to six ports) which is also backwards compatible of course with the older USB 1.1 devices.

We have seen what comes on the motherboard now lets look at what else is included with the motherboard. Let us start of first with the most basic things you would expect with a motherboard. The Chaintech 7NJS Zenith comes with two rounded IDE cables, one rounded floppy cable, two serial ATA cables, and an I/O plate. The addition of rounded cables is nice as opposed to the standard flat cables that can obstruct airflow within a case. The drivers CD and other software bundle are also included.

Also included is an audio kit where you get the SPDIF kit, the 6-channel kit, and the fiber optical cable. Another nice feature added is an IEE-1394 daughter card that adds firewire to the package. Now here is the really nice feature. Chaintech has included with this motherboard an exclusive front panel, the CBOX 2. The CBOX 2 is very functional providing four USB 2.0/1.1 ports, a headphone jack, a microphone jack, one IEE-1394 firwire port, and a green LED. The DigiDoc serves as and LED debugger with post codes to help trouble shoot system problems. In addition, you get all the necessary cables for connecting these extra ports to the motherboard.

So far, we have looked at all the onboard features and the package contents. The Chaintech 7NJS Zenith is a fully loaded motherboard and probably the most feature rich board we have reviewed to date. They even give you a key chain!