Layout
When it comes to packaging, Chaintech has to be way up there. Excellent, attractive looking packaging has never been a problem for them. A specially designed packaging was implemented to assure that the quality of ZENITH would be safely delivered to the hands of its owners. The motherboard is encased in a shockproof, antistatic clear plastic, environmentally friendly PET container that fully secures your ZENITH. The carry box complete with handle has all the simple and clear specification details that will allow you to know all about the ZENITH at a glance. With its attractive looking see-through window box design matched with yellow, black and gold motif, it is an eyecatcher.
The Zenith like its predecessors is an attractive looking board. The pcb itself is colored black and everything else is colored green including the bundled rounded cables.
All the metal components of the Chaintech 9EJS1 Zenith motherboard are colored gold including the northbridge heatsink together with its fan grill, giving the ZENITH the black and gold combination that makes it really look elegant and stand out against typical motherboards. Seeing that the I/O backpanel is different from the usual port placement, Chaintech has included a backplate to go with it as well.
The socket is your typical socket 478. Tall purple capacitors line the side of the heatsink retention mechanism. Heatsink installation was never an issue with this board.
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. In this position, there is less clutter caused by power cables thereby aiding in the airflow inside the case. The Chaintech 9EJS1 Zenith uses the i845PE chipset which supports two DDR DIMMs up to 2Gb maximum. It supports DDR266 and DDR333. Since the P4PE chipset could only support up to a maximum of 4 banks of memory, motherboards with 3 DIMM slots cannot take a third double sided ram module if any of the first 2 DIMMs has already got one. Having only 2 DIMMs, the ZENITH eliminates that dilemna as most ram modules now are sold as double sided.
Clearance between the agp card and the dimm locks is excellent. There is more than enough room for you to add and remove RAM without having to remove the agp card. The Zenith 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.
There are 6 PCI slots, the maximum for the board and one ACR slot. More than enough slots for all your PCI needs. Together with a lot of onboard devices, you'll be assured that you'll never run out. Why an ACR? Because that is where the included Firewire card will go.
Integrated USB 2.0 Controller can support up to 6 USB 2.0 ports. This is embedded in Intel's ICH4 chipset. Included in the package is the extra 4 USB ports and IEEE-1394a (Firewire) incorporated in their exclusive CBOX2 front panel. Again on a side note, this would have been even better if card readers have been integrated as well and a silver color for the frame perhaps?
On board LAN chip is provided by the highly reliable Realtek RTL8100B which supports 10/100 bps transfer rate. A Gigabit LAN would have been welcomed by a lot of users.
Integrated RAID Supports Ultra DMA up to 133MB/sec data transfer rate. This is provided by the Promise PDC20276 IDE RAID controller. Having this controller compensates for the i845PE's lack of ATA133 support. One gripe I have with this though is the fact that you cannot disable this option in the BIOS causing a long delay in boot up. Also a serial ATA using the Promise PDC20376 instead would have been a suitable option.
For onboard sound, the 9EJS1 Zenith uses CMI's 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. It also has support for SPDIF with all the necessary hardware to go with.
There is only 3 fan headers on the motherboard. One is already being used by the northbridge cooler, so that leaves just 2 available. Being an enthusiast board, to some this might be a disappointment but for me I never needed even one fan header as all my case fans are connected straight to the PSU. Even my CPU fan is using a molex adapter to get its power from the PSU. I really don't like getting power from the board especially if you have a lot of fans attached to it at the same time. I guess that by having a lot of hardware getting power direct from the board, stability issues might occur.