Layout
Excellent, attractive looking packaging has never been a problem for Chaintech. This has been seen on the last few vga packaging they have released. For some people, it doesn't matter, but for some, first impressions gives you the type of hardware you are dealing with. The APOGEE's packaging is what one can call a shockproof package box. With its attractive looking design matched with yellow, black and gold motif, it is an eyecatcher. You will notice the golden heatsink design, which is a sort of Chaintech trademark since the release of their new GF4 vga lines. Its even got a handle in the box for ease in carrying. The back of the box shows the specs and the what you get stuff complete with pictures to give you a better understanding of the product.
The APOGEE is an attractive looking board. The pcb itself is colored black, same as their vga's pcb, and everything else is colored yellow including the bundled rounded cables.
All the metal parts of the ports are coated with a gold color to give it the majestic look. This again has been seen before in the golden release of their vga cards.
The socket is your typical socket A with a thermistor in the middle of the slug. The area directly below the lugs are free from any circuitry in case the "screwdriver slip" happens during heatsink installation. There is also the presence of the 4 holes around it indicative of Chaintech's anticipation of newer and bigger heatsinks for use with very hot AMD chips. The only thing of concern is the closeness of some of the capacitors to the socket. This might pose as a problem for those very large heatsinks. I did however tried all my socket A heatsinks on this board and all of them fit without causing any problems.
The location of the atx power switch is for me, the best location. The ATX power supply header is located on the lower right side of the pcb and is directly below the dimm slots. As you can see, in this position, there is less clutter caused by power cables thereby aiding in the airflow inside the case.
The Chaintech 7VJL APOGEE uses the KT333 chipset which supports three DDR DIMMs up to 3Gb maximum. It supports PC1600, PC2100 and PC2700 DDR RAMs.
Clearance between the agp card and the dimm locks is acceptable. There is more than enough room for you to add and remove RAM without having to remove the agp card. The APOGEE board also comes equipped with an agp lock which is quite handy when moving your rig from place to place as in the case of LANs.
The Chaintech 7VJL supports ATA 133, the fastest and newest standard at the moment. It is capable of supporting up to four UDMA 133/100/66/33 drives.
There are 6 PCI slots, the maximum for the board. More than enough for all your PCI needs. Together with a lot of onboard devices, you'll be assured that you'll never run out.
The board is not totally jumperless. There are but a few jumpers that you need to fiddle with for proper operation. All overclocking though can be done thru the BIOS so this is not really a major weakness. Since you'll be using the jumpers initially, they have provided easy to remove colored jumpers. Honestly the only time I touched the jumper was on installation. I didn't even have to touch the CMOS jumper during all those times.
Embedded USB 2.0 Controller can support up to 6 USB 2.0 ports. Embedded in VIA's new VT8235 chipset, it can provide up to 480Mbps data rate. 40x faster than USB 1.1. All USB ports are fully backward compatible to USB 1.1. Included in the package is the extra 4 USB ports incorporated in their exclusive CBOX front panel.
Onboard PHY LAN using VIA's VT6103 ethernet controller supports 10/100 bps transfer rate. This is another feature welcomed by a lot of users.
With the APOGEE you get 6 channel (5.1) sound for free. It uses CMI's newest audio chipset, the CMI 8738 HRTF audio controller. It provides 6 speaker channel support, 32 voice HRTF based 3D positional audio, support for Microsoft direct sound 3D and Aureal A3D support for Creative EAX sound effects (environmental audio extensions). It's got full duplex operation for simlultaneous recording and playback.
