Chaintech 9CJS Zenith

Company: Chaintech
Product: 9CJS Zenith
Street Price: ~$280 USD
Date Reviewed: May 5, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (9/10)

Features:

The Chaintech 9CJS Zenith comes with a great deal of features. So let us get started. First the I/O configuration, there are two P2 two ports for keyboard and mouse, four USB ports, two RJ45 LAN ports, two serial ports, a parallel port and the audio jacks. The only thing that really seems to be missing on the back I/O are IEEE 1394 FireWire ports which can be found on the CBOX3 and the Chaintech Multimedia Card.

The i875P chipset supports the Pentium 4 800 MHz Front Side Bus CPU's as well as dual channel memory. One of the many features that the chipset provides is what Intel calls PAT or Performance Acceleration Technology. PAT allows for a more aggressive memory controller while maintaining stability.

Intel's new ICH5 (Southbridge) brings two important features to the 9CJS Zenith. The first feature is support for up to eight USB ports and the second is an integrated Serial ATA controller. The reason the Serial ATA controller is important is because on the i875P based motherboards, the Serial ATA controllers no longer use the PCI interface. The problem with using the PCI interface is that it can only provide for a 133MB/s transfer rate. As most know, Serial ATA supports a 150MB/s transfer rate. So using the Serial ATA controller on the PCI bus only bottleneck the system. The ICH5 totally bypasses the PCI bus and therefore can provide the full 150MB/s. The board comes with two Serial ATA ports located by the ICH5 chip.

Another nice feature of this motherboard is the dual LAN capabilities. Intel's own CSA GbE controller supports 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit LAN while the Realtek RTL8101L supports 10/100Mb Fast Ethernet. The benefits to having dual LAN capabilities are obvious.

IEEE1394 FireWire support is provided by the VIA VT6306 chip. This chip provides for data transfer rates up to 400Mb/s and supports the two FireWire ports found on the Chaintech Multimedia Card and the one port on the CBOX 3.