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Chaintech 7NJS - Up Close and Personal |
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Under the Hood |
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The
Bundle
Part of the
decision making process, when debating a new motherboard
purchase, is the accompanying bundle. While the
Chaintech 7NJS comes in significantly more expensive than
most ( $178 in various search engines ), let me tell
you that it's well worth it. This board packed just
about everything but the kitchen sink into the box.
From the second
the box arrives at the door you can tell it's packed.
The box is about twice the thickness of a normal motherboard
box and weighs about the same as a small piece of luggage
packed solid. Upon opening it, you find the
motherboard encased in hard plastic. Below that is the
rest of the surprise.
Inside you'll
find the SPDIF card, the IEEE-1349a card, yellow rounded IDE
cables, and lots more. They even went as far as
throwing in a Chaintech keychain. Also present, but
not pictured, is a Chaintech case badge and two Serial ATA (
SATA ) cables. Maybe the most useful accessory is the
Chaintech "CBox2". This is a front panel for your case
which fits perfectly into a 5.25" bay. On the CBox2 is
a display for the CPU temperature and a collection of ports
including USB and Firewire. Also included on the CBox2
is a headphone and microphone jack. So, for those of
you that don't have front ports in your case, the CBox2 will
come in quite handy. I would also like to note that
the Software package is quite nice, the most noteworthy
being Norton Antivirus 2002.
Under The Scope: Layout and Features
Now let's take a
closer look at the motherboard itself. Chaintech did
not skimp on the motherboard features either. This
board is packed pretty tight.
The I/O ports on
the back are nothing to gawk at, although they are gold
plated. It's pretty standard actually. Two USB
2.0 ports and a 10/100 Ethernet jack which is provided by
the Southbridge MCP-T chip. The MCP-T Southbridge not
only offers NVIDIA's own Ethernet MAC, but a second Ethernet
MAC provided by 3Com. The Chaintech does not take
advantage of this however, since only one Ethernet jack is
present. With the help of the CBox2, we can get access
to the remaining 4 USB 2.0 ports and the IEEE-1394a Firewire.
On board sound is provided by the CMedia 8738 controller,
which offers 6 channel sound, a game port, and SPDIF
support.
Promise
Technologies' PDC20376 SATA 150 RAID Controller was also
installed on this board. The setup that Chaintech
provides consists of two SATA channels and one EIDE channel
with RAID 0/1 support. This makes it a little more
cumbersome if you are setting up EIDE RAID, since Serial ATA
drives are pretty much non-existent at this point in time,
but has the option there for when we see SATA drives hit the
market. Some other noteworthy items are the location
of the ATX 12v connector. When I first plugged it in,
the wires were running right over the top of the CPU fan
causing it not to spin. One must be extremely careful
that the wires are tucked in above or below the CPU heatsink
to save the Athlon processor from certain thermal death.
The can capacitors located around the CPU socket don't leave
much room for a heftier heatsink. In today's world of
overclocking, cooling is a must and depending on what type
of cooling solution is used, this may be a slight downfall.
The AGP slot and memory slots are too close together.
If you're going to replace memory, you'll also have to pull
the graphics card. Finally, I would like to mention
that Chaintech equipped their board with jumpers that have
extensions on them to make them easier to handle. I
can't get over the detail offered with this board.
Chaintech left no stone unturned here.
The
BIOS
The Chaintech
7NJS uses a Phoenix Technology Award BIOS and it is setup
with the overclocker in mind. Almost everything is
tweakable in this BIOS. For starters, you get FSB
selections up to 200MHz in 1MHz increments. The Vcore
is adjustable up to 2.15V in 0.25v increments, which is very
impressive. Adding to that list we have AGP volt adjustable
to 2.0V in 0.1V increments and finally the DIMM voltage can
be adjusted as high as 3.2V in 0.1V increments. Being
able to adjust voltages this high allows for some pretty
serious overclocking. The only thing missing was the
PCI lock, although Chaintech claims that the PCI frequency
is locked at the 66/33MHz setting. There is, however,
a lock for the AGP timing. Overall, we have a variety
of options to get the overclock we're looking for.
Speaking of overclocking, I was only able to get the
Chaintech up to a 182MHz FSB with the CPU voltage set at
1.85V. This is definitely because we only had the
stock Athlon HSF available at the time. With some
aftermarket cooling, I'd be willing to bet that the 200MHz
FSB is reachable.
Let's move on to
our other nForce2 competitor: The Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro.
Next
Up: Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro
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