Chaintech 9CJS ZENITH - Intel I875 Reviewed

Motherboards/Intel S478 by jmke @ 2004-01-22

We take a closer look at Chaintech?s flagship P4 motherboard. Powered by the Intel 875 "Canterwood" Chipset it provides an excellent base for any performance P4 system. How does it stack up against the Asus P4C800 and what does "ZENITH" stand for? Find it out in this review.

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Extra's & Overclocking

Extra's:

The ZENITH series of Chaintech motherboards comes packed with goodies as mentioned before, the break-out box named CBOX3 offers you a 6-in-1 digital media card reader, USB and Firewire ports, audio connectors, a status LED and last but not least: a remote control option!

Madshrimps (c)


When the CBOX3 is completely hooked up you might end up with a cable mess, Chaintech provides you with the necessary tools and straps to make sure this doesn't happen

Madshrimps (c)
Update:In the picture I switched the cables of the port 80 with those of the sound, this is how they should be hooked up:
Please have the flat grey cable hooked on up port 80 to CN25 of the motherboard and the multicolored wire to CN2 on the CBOC3 (audio) to CN24 on the motherboard. —Chaintech Support
(thank you Kerry!)


The status led cycles through the BIOS self-test and system start-up codes going all the way up to FF. Once the system is up and running the LEDs show FF all the time, although it is nice to have a Frigging Fast system, it would have been more useful to show the CPU temperature. Only at boot up you get to see the CPU temp, but this passes by so fast that you hardly have the time get a glimpse of it.

The remote control however is a very useful gadget, the CBOX3 is connected to the Wake-on-Lan on the motherboard, which allows you then to boot up the PC by simply pressing the "Power" button on the RC! A big round "knob" on the RC makes it possible to move the mouse without too much effort. Other useful functions include play/pause/stop as well as increasing/decreasing the sound volume and when you install the included WinDVD application you can start it up from the RC with the press of a button.
The RC uses a infrared signal to communicate with the CBOX3 which means that it has to be pointed directly at CBOX3 to function properly, unlike ATI's "Remote Wonder" which uses RF.

The included rounded cables are of good quality and stand their ground easily when compared to 3rd party rounded cables. Their colour fits that of the IDE/Floppy connectors nicely, to give it the finish touch.


Overclocking

This motherboard will not disappoint the average overclocker; I was able to reach 280 FSB running the memory at 5:4, any higher would cause lock-ups. Thanks to Corsair who provided us with some PC4400 memory I was able to find the max. FSB limit when running in synchronous mode (1:1), 265-270Mhz is about as high as this board will go, not bad, but no Asus P4C800-E. Extreme overclockers might want to look elsewhere.

Chaintech included an overclocking utility "APOGEE":

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You can change FSB/PCI/AGP speeds, increase/decrease voltage to your CPU, DDR and AGP port! Quite impressive utility and very easy in use.
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