A Real Mother: Chaintech's 9EJS1 Zenith Motherboard Pahrump NV

Posted by : Jack Swanson

I've assembled a lot of systems using Chaintech motherboards, but I must say that the 9EJS1 Zenith is by far the best. It provides great performance and stability at an very reasonable price ($159 MSRP).

The Zenith's upsides are numerous. The CBOX2 front panel fits in any 5 1/4-inch drive bay and provides access to USB ports, a firewire port, headphones, microphone, and the DigiDoc, which gives the user an LCD readout of the current processor temperature and boot-up POST codes. Also, the front-side bus is built for 400 and 533MHz; there are five PCI slots for future expansion; and the integrated USB 2.0 controller supports up to six ports.

Other notable features of the Zenith are its onboard 10/100MB Fast Ethernet (Realtek RTL8100B); two standard IDE connectors and two additional UDMA/133 transfers using a Promise PDC20276 RAID controller; rounded cables, which are a nice switch from ribbon cables; two DIMM slots allowing expansion up to 2GB with PC2700 DDR SDRAM; AGP with up to 4x speed; a 1394 Firewire port; and HyperThreading, a feature in which one processor acts as two virtual processors, increasing the overall performance.

Sound is provided with the onboard Cmedia audio chipset. This provides six-speaker support, 32-voice HRTF-based 3D positional audio, support of Microsoft direct sound 3D, Aureal A3D support for Creative EAXsound effects, and full Duplex operation allowing simultaneous recording and playback.

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