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)

Overclocking:

To test the overclocking on this board we used an AMD XP2800 Thoroughbred B. This chip is unlocked by the motherboard, which makes overclocking very easy with the CPU not bottlenecking the overclock. We used Corsair XMS 3500 platinum series that we reviewed in the past. We chose this memory for its good overclocking capabilities. Using an 11x multiplier, we set the FSB to 200. This would put our CPU a little under its stock speed but this leaves any instability that might occur up to the motherboard and memory. Booting in a 200 FSB and running benchmarks was no problem at all. Not once at this speed did we encounter instability. We then decided to try 210 FSB with a 10.5 multiplier. Again, we had no issues running at this FSB. Now when we tried to go higher than 210 was when we started having problems. Over 210 when encountered hard drive corruption issues. We are not sure why these occurred but it was definitely over 210 when it started happening.

We got the board up to 220 but after having to do countless reinstalls of Windows XP, we declared that our board was only good up to 210 for it to be 100% stable. This is not bad at all though. Some boards do not go this high straight out of the box. Therefore, we are impressed with the Chaintech 7NJS Zenith’s overclocking capabilities and are satisfied with this experience minus the hard drive corruption over 210 FSB.

Test Systems & Benchmarks Used: