The Chaintech Zenith CT-7NJS is a deluxe high end board, it comes in a shiny black and gold box the size of a breeze block! This board seems to be aimed at the overclocker, and the high end workstation market. This board has everything you could possibly want in the way of features and extras. Opening the box is like Christmas come early. The first thing to come out is the board itself, which sits in a clear plastic container underneath a window in the box, which shows off the rather stylish Northbridge cooler. Underneath this there is the front panel, in a sturdy little box of its own, with a multitude of wires, a set of 3 rounded cables, 2 IDE and one for the floppy, a pair of SATA cables, a quick start manual that folds out as big as a poster, a thick manual, a Firewire card, an IO shield, a front panel sticker, 2 blackplates with more audio connectors on them, 2 CDs in a proper jewel case, and a key ring in a nice little presentation box!

Specification and features

nForce 2 SPP Northbridge nForce 2 MCP-T southbridge
AGP 8x
Dual DDR 266/333/400 support
IDE RAID
Front Panel inc. USB 2.0 X4, Firewire X1 mic jack, headphone jack, MOBO diagnostics LED display, and CPU temp readout.
Bundled ACR Firewire card
X2 Serial ATA channels
Onboard 6 channel audio
Rounded IDE and FDD cables

The 7NJS comes with all sorts of features, the most useful probably being the front panel. It is a little like a Front X bay, but a lot more aesthetically pleasing. There are separate cables for each port on it, which makes for quite a cable mess when they are all used. The most useful feature on it is the little LCD panel which displays motherboard error codes, and the CPU temperature. This little display would be very useful when overclocking, and is certainly a much more elegant solution than motherboard monitor or other software temperature monitors. The bundled rounded IDE cables are very nice and flexible, and 60cm long, as advertised on the box. They include a tab to pull on to unplug them, which is useful as the boots on the wire are not attached to either the cable or the connector, and tend to slide up and down. Chaintech have seen fit to equip the 7NJS with an AMR slot, which looks just like a PCI slot, except it's the wrong way round. These slots are usually rather useless for 99% of users, but Chaintech have kindly included a Firewire card to put in it.

Layout and Aesthetics

Chaintech have gone for a brown and gold colour scheme, with yellow slots and connectors. The brown is so dark as to appear black unless in good light. The result is quite striking, and although the gold effect Northbridge cooler seemed a little bling bling at first, it has grown on me. With such a feature packed board, layout is very important, especially since this board isn't terribly wide. The IDE slots are parallel to the edge, with the floppy connector right at the bottom. The rounded cables mean there is no unslightly cable mess here at all, which is a good start. Surprisingly for a high end board, the Chaintech doesn't make use of the extra p4 power connector, and just has the standard ATX connector located to the left of the CPU socket, which is not really ideal for cable routing, but is better than some as it is quite near the top. The dimm slots just clear the AGP card with a few mill to spare, and the lower part of the board sprouts pin headers all over. The only big layout problem, and one I did not expect to encounter with a high end board like this, was socket clearance. I had a very fiddly job fitting an AX7 sink to this board, as the picture shows, it is just touching one of the capacitors. There is acres of room on the other sides of the socket, but things are just a little too tight for comfort on the lower edge.

Usability

As you would expect with a board that has this many extras, not everything is self explanatory. The manual does the explaining very efficiently though. It is 92 pages long, and all in English. It includes information on setting up and using the surround sound features, and it walks you though setting up a raid array as well. The quick start manual/poster tells you everything to need to just plug it all in and fire it up successfully. My only complaint is that it would have been nice to have the power switch header marked on the board. Construction was hassle free after the problems with getting the heatsink on, as all of the sockets (apart from the switches and LEDs) were labeled on the board.

Performance and overclocking

The Chaintech Zenith CT-7NJS did well in the benchmarks, scoring well on the Radeon 8500 3dmark tests especially. As you would expect from a board in this price range, the BIOS has a full range of overclocking options. The northbridge cooler works well, and is defiantly up to the task. The CPU temperature readout on the front panel would prove very useful indeed for overclockers. The CPU socket clearance is very tight with an AX7, but the AX7 is about as big as heatsinks come, so I doubt that clearance issues will restrict your choice of heatsink.

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