i875P Based Mainboard from Chaintech

by Anton Shilov
04/11/2003 | 07:07 PM

We continue our excursion in the short-term future, when Intel announces its i875P (Canterwood) chipset and also a new Pentium 4 processor with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus. Besides the Santa Clara-based giant, numerous its partners will also unleash their mainboards based on the mentioned core-logic (you can find the latest roadmaps from a lot of mainboard makers below the news-story) and that is the thing we are going to talk about this time.

Chaintech, who now mostly known for its not really expensive but pretty feature-rich mainboards, was first widely recognized for its famous 6BTM mainboard for Intel Pentium II and Celeron (Socket 370) processors. Unfortunately, after 6BTM the company has not launched anything really remarkable, though, Chaintech does not give up and on Monday the company will try to return its better days by announcing its i875P powered “Zenith” 9CJS. As all the mainboards that are branded as Zenith, this one brings us quite an interesting product bundle as well as rich set of features.

The mainboard itself does not differ much from other high-end solutions on i875P chipsets we have already mentioned in our news, but still can boast with a number of advantages, have a look:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Celeron processors with 400/533/800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with up to 3.20GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i875P chipset, including Canterwood MCH and ICH5R I/O controller;
• 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs;
• 5 PCI slots, an AGP 8x slot and a CMR slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller (rounded cable supplied!);
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID 0.
• Up to 8 USB 2.0 ports;
• FireWire (IEEE1394) support;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Intel or Realtek;
• 7.1-channel audio solution VIA ENVY 24PT;
• Lots of additional tuning functions, including technologies found on all present mainboards from Chaintech;
• ATX Form Factor.

Besides advanced audio-solution from VIA, Chaintech also supplies a card-reader (SM/MS/CF/MMC/SDC/MD) and a remote controller to control certain capabilities of a personal computer.

VTR Hardware web-site, who published the information about the mainboard over here has not said anything about the cost of the product.