by Anna Filatova
07/01/2002 | 10:54 PM
Our friends from Clubic shared with us some interesting news from Chaintech. This company, which is well-known in the world as a manufacturer of not very expensive products, is planning to start paying special attention to the enthusiast users by introducing the new Apogee, Zenith and Summit product brands.
The first two peculiarities of these mainboards are a very originally designed cooler on the chipset North Bridge (we have seen something like that only on the mainboards so far), and the brightly yellow colour of the PCI, DIMM, floppy and IDE ports (we wouldn’t call onboard IDE RAID, LAN and USB 2.0 controllers distinguishing features).<%BANNER[article]%>
Now a few words about more significant differences. The Apogee package includes very originally designed round cables (something like SerialATA cables, probably), a small CBOX fitting into the regular 3-inch bay of the PC case (it features 4 USB ports, Mic In and a port for Body Theatre device) and the Body Theatre itself, which is none other but a set of head phones, which allegedly allows to hear “pseudo 4.1-channel sound better. All these items will be packed into a nice box with a handle together with the bunch of CD-disks.
The Zenith mainboards will also be equipped with IEEE 1394a (FierWire) controller and Summit boards will represent a more modest solution going without the CBOX and Body Theatre, and with the regular “band” cables.
The first mainboards under these brand names will be based on VIA KT333, i845E and i845G and will start shipping within the nearest 2-3 weeks.