Well, the mainboard makers do not change their marketing policy very often. Therefore, when such a thing happens, it draws everyone's attention and becomes the talk of the town. Take Chaintech as an example. This company used to target its entry-level products at undemanding users. Now the situation is quite different. Chaintech has radically changed its course and enlarged its product range. As a result, the company now offers three independent mainboard families each occupying its own price niche and targeted for users with different needs.

For ordinary users who don't need any extra stuff or special overclocking options onboard, Chaintech offers the Summit mainboard family. For those who want to have the best solution from the price-to-performance point of view and also some overclocking options, there is the Apogee series. The third mainboard family from Chaintech, Zenith, consists of expensive mainboards with rich features that come with a lot of extra equipment. Thus, Chaintech is trying to broaden its "target group".

It is still rather early to conclude whether this attempt was a success or not. But it is a true that there are now more interesting products in the market. Today, we will introduce to you one of the first mainboards from Chaintech that belongs to the most advanced Zenith family. Our test lab welcomed a Chaintech 7NJS mainboard based on the nForce2 SPP chipset from NVIDIA. By the way, it's a meaningful fact that Chaintech was among the few manufacturers that were the first to offer nForce2-based solutions. Having changed its policy, Chaintech entered the club of the most renowned and respected mainboard makers and stands now next to ABIT, ASUS, EPoX, MSI and others.

So, let's see what wonders the new Chaintech 7NJS mainboard from the Zenith family has in store for us.

Specifications

Chaintech 7NJS
Supported CPUs	AMD Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron (333/266/200MHz FSB, Socket A)
Chipset	NVIDIA nForce2 SPP + MCP-T
FSB frequencies	100-200MHz
Overclocking friendly features	CPU clock multiplier adjustment from 3 to 22.5x Vcore, Vmem and Vagp adjustment AGP frequency adjustment from 50 to 100MHz
Memory	3 DDR DIMM slots for DDR400/DDR333/DDR266 SDRAM Supports single- and dual-channel memory access
AGP slot	AGP 8x
Expansion Slots (PCI/ACR/CNR)	5/1/0
USB 1.1 ports	0
USB 2.0 ports	6
IEEE 1394 ports	3
ATA-100/133	+/+
SerialATA-150	2 channels (Promise PDC20376 controller)
Integrated IDE RAID controller	Promise PDC20376 (two SerialATA-150 channels + one ATA/133 channel)
Integrated Sound	6-channel PCI sound controller: C-media 8738MX with SPDIF support
Integrated LAN	10/100Mbit Ethernet (MCP-T)
Additional Features	CBOX 2 info-panel support
BIOS	AwardBIOS v6.00PG
Form-Factor	ATX, 305x230mm

We would like to say a few words on the package contents of Chaintech 7NJS. One of the signs that this product belongs to the Zenith family is the infinite list of various devices and thingies that come with the mainboard.

Besides the user's manual and the software bundle, we also found the following items in the box:

• A CBOX 2 panel installed into the 5"-bay of the chassis.
  
  This panel carries four USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE1394 port, audio in- and outputs, one informative LED and a two-digit indicator panel to show POST codes during the start-up and the CPU temperature during work.
• Two round aerodynamic 60cm IDE cables and one round FDD cable.
• Two SerialATA cables.
• A bracket for the back panel of the case with an audio output onto the rear speakers, central speaker and subwoofer.
• A bracket for the back panel with optical SPDIF audio in- and output.
• An optical audio cable with TosLink connectors and a TosLink-miniTosLink adapter.
• An ACR expansion card with two IEEE1394 ports.
• A bag with thermal paste.
• A trinket with the company logo.

Yeah, we don't often see such a heap of stuff inside one box. By the way, all these things are packed with the mainboard into a big colorful package with a transparent window and a handle to carry it.

Closer Look

On the whole, the features of a mainboard depend on the chipset it is based on. NVIDIA provided its nForce2 with a lot of things we are used to seeing in modern mainboards, so it would be silly for the manufacturer not to use the chipset's features to the full extent. Moreover, as the heart of Chaintech 7NJS - the nForce2 SPP - is the newest Socket A chipset today, the mainboard can boast the support of the newest CPUs and memory modules.

To be precise, the mainboard supports all processors from the Athlon XP, Athlon and Duron families, including those with 333MHz system bus. By the way, the nForce2 proves best of all working with these CPUs. Moreover, we can be quite sure that upcoming Barton-based processors with 512KB L2 cache will be smoothly running in Chaintech 7NJS mainboard. It should also be mentioned that at the last Comdex Fall NVIDIA showcased processors with 400MHz bus working in nForce2 SPP based mainboards. So, we can state with some certainty that the nForce2 chipset as well as nForce2-based mainboards will have a long life cycle.

The same concerns the memory types supported. The nForce2 chipset allows clocking the memory bus independently of the FSB, so DDR266/DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM modules can be used at any FSB frequency. This is actually one of the major differences between nForce2 and VIA KT400, as the latter only allows synchronous memory clocking at FSB frequency over 333MHz. Of course, the Chaintech 7NJS supports both: single- (64-bit) and dual-channel (128-bit) memory access. The three DDR DIMM slots available on the mainboard PCB are split into two groups. The first two of them refer to the first channel, the third slot refers to the second channel. So, in order to achieve maximum performance, you should install two identical modules: one into the DIMM3 slot and the other into any of the remaining two slots. DDR400 support is a kind of a tricky issue, as this specification has not been officially ratified yet. Anyway, modules like that are rather widely spread in the market and Chaintech even lists DDR400 modules that have been tested for correct work with the 7NJS. Among them are:

• 256MB modules from TwinMos on TMD7608F8E50B chips;
• 512MB modules from ADATA on Winbond W942508BH-5 chips;
• 256MB modules from Kingmax on KDL684T4AA-50 chips.

The discrete version of the nForce2 chipset used in the Chaintech 7NJS also supports AGP 8x graphics cards. In order to avoid any questions concerning compatibility of the chipset with different AGP 8x graphics cards, we want to say that all of them, including AGP 8x cards based on ATI graphics chips, work with the Chaintech 7NJS without any problems.

As we see, the Chaintech engineers used all the capabilities of the nForce2 SPP North Bridge to the full extent in their 7JNS board. Unfortunately, we can't say the same thing about the South Bridge. Although Chaintech 7NJS uses the most advanced South Bridge from NVIDIA, MCP-T, not all of its functionality was implemented in the mainboard.

In particular, Chaintech 7NJS has all the six USB 2.0 ports, three IEEE1394 ports and two ATA/133 channels that are available through the MCP-T. But MCP-T also features two network controllers and a sound APU controller with Dolby Digital 5.1 support. However, only one network controller is available in Chaintech's baby. Instead of NVIDIA's APU, Chaintech provided an external PCI CMI8738MX controller.

Note that the use of external controller seems to be worsening the overall mainboard characteristics. Thus, it can't compete with the NVIDIA's APU in sound quality, doesn't support Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding and loads the CPU much more. It can beat any AC'97 codec in functionality, though, it is especially true for the full six-channel SPDIF-enabled version of it used in the Chaintech 7NJS. The cause of these strange manipulations with the audio part of the mainboard lies in Chaintech's unwillingness to increase the cost of its product through licensing fees that would be inevitable if the company used the APU.

Chaintech 7NJS has only one of the two Ethernet controllers available. The one developed by NVIDIA itself, not the one from 3Com. Well, the absence of the second network controller doesn't seem to be much of a drawback: one network connection is usually enough for most computers.

Besides the above-described features, Chaintech provided its mainboard with SerialATA and IDE RAID support. It's implemented via Promise PDC20376 controller. By the way, for some mysterious reason, the mainboard doesn't allow turning this controller off. Promise PDC20376 formally supports one ATA/133 channel and two SerialATA-150 channels that are actually available on the mainboard.

This controller allows connecting single Parallel and SerialATA devices as well as uniting them into RAID arrays of levels 0 and 1. 0+1 RAID is not supported. We also want to point out a certain deficiency of the SerialATA implementation in this controller. In fact, Promise PDC20376 is nothing else, but the older PDC20276 chip with one of the former ATA/133 channels re-designed into a SerialATA-150 one. That's why the SerialATA ports of the controller cannot reach their proper theoretical bandwidth of 150MB/sec and go no further than 133MB/sec. But that's really of no importance now as the SerialATA controller is connected to the PCI bus that has the maximum theoretical bandwidth of 133MB/sec. It's rather early so far to expect bandwidth growth on transition to SerialATA. Fully-fledged SerialATA controllers may be either integrated into the chipset or connected via faster buses than the 32-bit 33MHz PCI. Also the ATA/133 channel referring to the Promise PDC20376 is laid out in such a way that it supports only one Master device.

The CBOX 2 panel from the shipment package of the Chaintech 7NJS deserves a separate word. Besides quite a few ports laid out to the front of the computer (four USB 2.0 ports, one IEEE1394 port, audio in- and output port), this module also serves as a kind of a POST controller.

During the start-up process, the two-digit panel indicator shows POST codes that may help to discover system failures, if there are any. Moreover, this indicator can display CPU temperature, too. We will talk about it later in the review. Under this indicator, there is a green LED, which can be theoretically connected to any system component that allows such treatment. Chaintech recommends using it to indicate the transition of the system to the Green mode.

PCB Design and Our Impressions of It

It's quite clear that people at Chaintech wanted to impress the potential customer with the shipment package as well as with the exterior of the mainboard. Chaintech 7NJS is covered in deep-brown lacquer. All the slots and connectors are yellow. Moreover, all the external connectors and the active chipset cooler are all painted with gold paint. In general, Chaintech 7NJS is one of the most impressive-looking mainboards we have ever seen.

But the varicolored exterior of the thing doesn't tell on its consumer qualities, so let's forget about it for a while. As for upgrade options, the mainboard is equipped with five PCI, one AGP 8x, one ACR and three DIMM slots. You will probably want to install the card with IEEE1394 ports that comes with the mainboard into the ACR slot.

The PCB is rather small, but has a lot of integrated chips onboard. That's why Chaintech didn't succeed in designing the mainboard layout well. For example, the 20-pin ATX power supply connector is behind the Socket A, so the attached power cable will hang over the CPU cooler, hindering proper air flow. Some problems may also arise during the installation of PCI cards because of some connectors located next to PCI slots. The FDD connector is placed on the left of the mainboard, so the FDD cable will go through the whole length of the system case. There is some solace, though. The cables that come with the mainboard have a circular section and don't disturb the airflow inside the chassis that much.

Chaintech engineers couldn't also avoid the common problem when the installed AGP card locks DIMM slots clips. But as the DIMM slots are rather advanced forward on the PCB, this problem will only occur when you use cards longer than the RADEON 9700 PRO.

The CPU socket, however, features an excellent location by Chaintech 7NJS. There are no protruding components near the Socket A, so you can easily install a massive cooling system. There are also four mounting holes around the CPU socket, which will be useful for the installation of some overclocking systems.

The CPU voltage regulator in the Chaintech 7NJS is quite ordinary, designed following a two-phase scheme. A separate linear regulator ensures memory power supply, which surely increases more reliable memory operation.

In the end, we want to add that the CPU overheating protection scheme is based on the values measured by the thermal diode built into the processor. This thermal diode is also used for common CPU temperature monitoring.

BIOS and Overclocking

The BIOS of Chaintech 7NJS is based on the well-known AwardBIOS v.6.00PG microcode, although the NVIDIA nForce2 chipset brings about some new things due to its ability to support asynchronous work of different buses. Accordingly, you can find various settings for configuring FSB, memory and AGP buses in the Setup. Chaintech paid a lot of attention to overclocking, so there are options for adjusting memory timings and various voltages. But the organization of the BIOS Setup in the Chaintech 7NJS lacks some order. Memory timings and frequencies settings belong to the Advanced Chipset Features page:

And voltage adjustments can be found on another page: Frequency/Voltage Control.

As we see, notwithstanding the name, this BIOS Setup page contains no frequency adjustment options. That's not a very serous problem, though. Let's better see what configuration options Chaintech 7NJS offers the user.

CPU overclocking comes first. BIOS Setup allows setting the FSB frequency from 100 to 200MHz with 1MHz increment. The upper border might be higher, but this is the only thing that can disappoint an overclocker in Chaintech 7NJS. Next to the FSB setting, there is an option for CPU multiplier modification. The BIOS Setup of Chaintech 7NJS acquired this option only in November, but it's a real good thing. You can use it without unlocking the CPU. Chaintech 7NJS can pass around the locked multiplier in Thoroughbred based Athlon XP processors and allows changing the multiplier from BIOS Setup without any CPU modification. This is a great advantage of the 7JNS. As for the CPU voltages, you have got a full range of them: from 1.4 to 2.15V with 0.025V increment.

The memory frequency is set by Chaintech 7NJS relative to the FSB frequency. BIOS Setup offers a lot of various FSB-to-memory ratios. Here is a list of available memory bus frequency values (relative to the FSB): by SPD, Sync, 50%, 60%, 66%, 75%, 80%, 83%, 120%, 125%, 133%, 150%, 166%, 200%. So, it's easy to pick up a right memory frequency for any FSB frequency value. We should remind you, though, that our tests and NVIDIA's claims agree that nForce2-based mainboards work the fastest of all if the FSB and memory are clocked synchronously.

For those who are interested, BIOS Setup allows adjusting memory timings manually. The range of possible values is impressive, really. While CAS Latency can be 2, 2.5 or 3, T (RAS) changes from 1 to 15, and T(RCD) and T(RP) - from 1 to 7. We haven't encountered mainboards yet with such a broad memory timings range. It is also possible to adjust the DIMM modules voltage. You can increase it from the standard 2.5V to 3.2V with 0.1V increment.

The AGP frequency is independent of the FSB in Chaintech 7NJS. The frequencies available are 50MHz and any value from 66 to 100MHz. AGP bus voltage can be raised from 1.5V to 2V with 0.1V increment.

So, Chaintech 7NJS seems to be ready for a great overclocking experience. Hardware monitoring functions also proved just excellent.

Two temperatures, rotation speeds of two fans and nine voltages are monitored. It's nice that the CPU temperature is taken from the thermal diode built into the CPU itself. The software bundled with Chaintech 7NJS includes their brand name Digidoc monitoring utility.

This utility performs two jobs. Firstly, it allows monitoring the system status from Windows. Secondly, it shows the CPU temperature through the indicator on the CBOX 2 panel. So, even if you don't see Digidoc in the System Tray (for example, in full-screen games), you will still be able to check the pulse of your computer.

Now, we would like to say a few words about practical overclocking of Chaintech 7NJS. We took an Athlon XP 2700+ processor and tried to set the maximum FSB frequency at which the mainboard would work stably. We also used Corsair XMS3200 (DDR400 CL2 SDRAM) memory modules that are guaranteed to work at 400MHz. The multiplier was reduced to 10x during the tests, so that the frequency limit of this given CPU couldn't tell on overclocking.

But we were disappointed. The highest FSB frequency we managed to reach was only 169MHz. At 170MHz FSB, the mainboard wouldn't start up and issued C1 POST code meaning that there was memory initialization error. It turned out that the mainboard incorrectly set memory timings during overclocking if they were not set manually. But if you rely entirely on yourself, not onto the mainboard, and specify all the timings with your own hands, you can conquer much higher FSB clock-rates. In our following tests, we couldn't overcome the 180MHz barrier, though. So, it's no simple task to overclock the CPU with Chaintech 7NJS, in spite of the numerous settings that are intended to ease this procedure. Let's hope that this drawback will be corrected in future versions of the mainboard BIOS.

There was one more unpleasant issue we noticed during CPU overclocking. This mainboard turns to have no means to re-set CPU parameters in case of "over-overclocking". So, if the system doesn't power up after some manipulations in BIOS Setup, the only way to return it back to life is the Clear CMOS jumper.

Performance

Before turning to the actual benchmarks results, we would like to remind you that mainboards based on one and the same chipset don't differ greatly in their performance. So when deciding on a particular mainboard, you should pay special attention to rich features, overclocking options, stability and reliability, and technical support rather than the performance in benchmarks.

Besides, as we know, NVIDIA nForce2 is the fastest chipset today. However, even taking into account the things mentioned in the passage above we still compared the performance of Chaintech 7NJS with that of another nForce2-based mainboard, ASUS A7N8X.

Testbed configuration:

• AMD Athlon XP 2700+ CPU (333MHz bus frequency);
• ASUS A7N8X and Chaintech 7NJS mainboards;
• 2 x 256MB DDR400 CAS2 Corsair XMS3200 memory (was working in DDR333 SDRAM mode);
• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4400 graphics card;
• Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80GB HDD.

The benchmarks were run in Windows XP operation system, the platforms were set at maximum performance.

The obtained test results are listed in the table below:

As we see, the mainboard from ASUS is just a little bit faster.

Conclusion

On the whole, Chaintech's attempt to enter the high-end mainboard market should be considered successful. Chaintech 7NJS mainboard will definitely find its way to the customer. A lot of auxiliary equipment, stylish exterior, numerous features - all these things can entice a user who's seeking a high-end mainboard for his Socket A platform. And still we might wish that Chaintech worked a bit harder on polishing its products off, rather than concerning themselves with outer looks and box contents. Chaintech 7NJS has a number of positive qualities, but annoying flaws in the PCB layout and BIOS code spoil somewhat the overall impression of the product. Moreover, we have the right to demand immaculate work from this mainboard, as it costs just a little below $200. Unfortunately, at the time this review is posted on our site, the mainboard still has problems working with the FSB clock-rate exceeding 166MHz.

Highs:

• Supports modern Athlon XP CPUs with 333MHz bus frequency;
• Supports dual-channel memory access;
• Supports up-to-date technologies, including USB 2.0, IEEE1394, Ethernet, SerialATA and IDE RAID;
• Rich memory configuration and overclocking options, including multiplier adjustment in CPUs with the locked multiplier;
• Supports built-in processor thermal diode for temperature measurements;
• Rich shipment package, including the CBOX 2 panel.

Lows:

• Certain problems with overclocking the FSB over 166MHz;
• No means to turn off the IDE RAID controller;
• Certain flaws in PCB design.