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 nforce2 like its old brother, the APOGEE, is an attractive looking board. The pcb itself is colored black and everything else is colored yellow including the bundled rounded cables.
All the metal components of the Chaintech 7NJS nForce2 motherboard are colored gold including the northbridge heatsink, giving the ZENITH the black and gold combination that makes it really look elegant and stand out against normal motherboards. Chaintech has included a backplate to go with it as well.
The socket doesn't have the thermistor in the middle as it uses the thermal diode. 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. There are 4 big capacitors beside this nForce 2 board socket but are well away from it making big heatsinks like the Volcano 7+ fit easily and without any problems.
The location of the ZENITH's ATX power header is definitely not the best in my point of view. It is located just beside the socket behind the capacitors. The power cables may impede the circulation of air directly above the cpu heatsink.
The Chaintech 7NJS nForce2 motherboard supports 3 DDR DIMMs up to 3Gb maximum. It supports PC1600/2100/2700/3200 Dual-Channel DDR modules. If you are to use the Dual DDR feature, you have to put one of the DDR module on the third DIMM (DDR3) which can be easily distuinguished as it is seperated from the other 2 DIMMs.
Clearance between the agp card and the dimm locks is a bit tight. There is not much room for you to add and remove RAM without having to remove the agp card. The Chaintech ZENITH nForce2 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 ZENITH 7NJS nForce2 supports ATA 133 via its native IDE and ATA150 via the Serial ATA. It is capable of supporting up to 6 UDMA 133/100/66/33 drives and 2 Serial ATA drives. It also has builtin single channel RAID feature to go with the Serial ATA courtesy of the Promise PDC20376 chip.
There are 5 PCI slots and 1 ACR slot. 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. Why ACR? Because that is where the included Firewire card will go.
Embedded USB 2.0 Controller can support up to 6 USB 2.0 ports. Embedded in the nforce2 MCP-T 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 and IEEE-1394a (Firewire) incorporated in their exclusive CBOX2 front panel. Onboard LAN is also embedded in the MCP-T chipset providing 2 x Ethernet MAC (NVIDIA and 3Com).
For the onboard LAN, The ZENITH nForce2 uses an external PHY controller, the ICS 1893Y-10 chip. It can provide both half- or full-duplex operation at data rates of 10 MHz or 100 MHz.
With the Chaintech ZENITH nForce2 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. It also has support for SPDIF with all the necessary hardware to go with.
With the DigiDoc System Monitoring Display incorporated to the Chaintech ZENITH nForce2 board, it can monitor the cpu temperature and give an LCD readout via the CBOX2. It also display 80-Port POST codes during POST at boot up.
I can see a Smart Card Reader port but the CBOX2 has no support for this at the moment. Though I have heard that CBOX3 will have this feature integrated as well. Nice to have that upgrade feature prepared for you though it would have been really great if it has already been integrated here.
