Introduction.

Up until very recently the Socket A chipset market has been dominated by VIA technologies, with most notably class leading products such as the superb KT266A and KT333 chipsets. Occasional forays have been made into the Socket A chipset market by the likes of Ali, SiS and AMD. Whilst there have been a variety of very good and often quite interesting chipsets from the likes of Ali and AMD, they have almost always played second place to VIA. The only real threat to emerge over the past two years has been from graphics chipset firm Nvidia.

Nvidia has become a household name in PC circles for consistently being at the high-end of PC graphics for the best part of five years. Taking over a market from graphics chipset firms such as Matrox, Trident, et al has been a significant achievement for Nvidia who now only have one real rival in the form of Ati. Nividia though have never been 100% satisfied being just a graphics chipset manufacturer (or GPU as they prefer to call it) and during 2001 turned their attentions to the CPU chipset market. Many observers expected Nvidia to instantly walk away with the accolade of best Socket A chipset when the Nforce appeared, but this was not to be. Delayed by up to six months, the original Nforce had a number of issues which dogged it and prevented it from gaining widespread market acceptance. What it did have was an innovative dual channel memory bus and a reputation for impressive performance.

At the same time all this was going on, Nvidia produced the core logic and graphics chipset for the Xbox. It was obvious that Nvidia could design and build a first class chipset which was good enough to be used in a high-profile product such as Xbox.

Nvidia went away from the Nforce 1 adventure and sought to build upon what they had learnt from their first ever PC chipset and returned in late 2002 with the Nforce 2 chipset. Similar to the original Nforce, the Nforce 2 used the same innovative dual channel memory bus, but with now support for PC-2700 DDR SDRAM and the 333 MHz (166 DDR) front side bus as used by the “Thoroughbred” Athlon XP.

The test board which we are reviewing comes from Chaintech. This is the third board we have seen from Chaintech over the past year. Whilst we have seen many high-end and feature packed boards, the first two boards from Chaintech, the CT-7VJDA and CT-7AIA5 have been aimed at the mainstream market with not quite having the same high-end options as their counterparts. We were then rather pleasantly surprised to see a rather large package turn up in the form of the CT-7NJS Zenith, which upon opening revealed a whole host of goodies. We realised that here was a board designed to rival the best that Epox and Soyo could throw at it.

To see how the CT-7NJS Zenith fared, read on...

Specifications.