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)

Board Layout:

The 9CJS layout is very good for the most part. There were only a few issues that we encountered that could be fixed with a few minor changes to the design of the board. One of the first things we almost always look for when examining the layout of a motherboard is where the power connections are located. The 20 pin connector on this board is positioned to the right edge which is the best place for the connector. It will not interfere with the heat sink or any surrounding electronics such as capacitors. Other nice things to note is that the IDE and floppy connectors are all to the far right side of the board so that they will not be in the way of the other components.

An active cooling solution is used to cool the Northbridge. Considering the Northbridge does get hot, the use of the heat sink and fan should help out quite a bit. We checked under the heat sink and it was making good contact and we were happy to see the use of a silver based compound similar to Arctic Silver 3. WE are not sure what type of compound it was for sure but at least it is not the white goop or the thermal pad. The one problem with the heat sink on the Northbridge is that it interfered with the Cool Link heat sink we were using for testing. One of the mounting clamps was pushing the Northbridge cooler a little. This could pose problems in the future but we managed to get good contact by just sliding the heat sinks around a bit.

One other issue that is very common on motherboards is the positioning of the AGP slot in respect to the DIMM slots. On this particular motherboard the memory slots are low enough on the board to where a long video card such as the Radeon 9800 Pro or the GeForce 4 Ti4600 will make removing memory a tough task. The user will have to remove the AGP card to take out the memory. This is not a major issue since it does not affect the overall performance of the board but it is a nuisance for some consumers.

Besides the few issues we did find, the boards layout is still good. We understand that it is a tough task to try to fit all the components on the motherboard especially with a board as feature rich as this one. When we have more motherboards to look at perhaps we will see if placement is any better or if there is just too many parts to fit in a little space.