The layout
Chaintech employs a original black-and-baby-blue color scheme for the Zenith 9CJS. Bright red, blue, and neon colors have been done to death by motherboard and graphics card manufacturers, so it's nice to see Chaintech painting with a different palette.

The Zenith 9CJS's layout is generally good considering how many slots, ports, and chips Chaintech's engineers have squeezed on to the board. However, I'm not a fan of the power plug placement. Generally, I prefer to see power plugs along the top edge of a motherboard to reduce cable clutter. To its credit, the Zenith 9CJS's plug placement doesn't require routing power cords around or over the CPU socket.

Intel's Socket 478 heat sink cradle all but ensures clearance for larger heat sinks and non-standard retention mechanisms. However, Chaintech has gone a little overboard with the Zenith 9CJS's north bridge cooling system, which is rather large and close enough to the CPU socket to complicate heat sink installation. The north bridge heat sink's shiny top plate creates most of the clearance problems, but it's only there for eye candy and can easily be removed. The north bridge heat sink's fins, however, are functional and cannot be removed; they probably shouldn't even be bent. Larger CPU heat sink retention mechanisms may interfere with the fins, but there's just enough clearance for Intel's reference heat sinks.

The Zenith 9CJS serves up two pairs of color-coded DIMM slots. Since dual-channel memory configurations need a pair of DIMMs for optimal performance, users will want to add memory to the board two DIMMs at a time. With two pairs of DIMM slots, one could start out with one pair of DIMMs and add a second set later as needed.

Unfortunately, adding DIMMs to the Zenith 9CJS is a little tricky with an AGP card installed. There's just enough clearance around the board's AGP slot to accommodate longer graphics cards like NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4600, but larger graphics cards will interfere with the DIMM slot retention tabs.

Normally, clearance issues between the AGP and DIMM slots can be blamed on the extra real estate required by a sixth PCI slot. However, the Zenith 9CJS only has five PCI slots:

Well, five PCI slots and one CMR (Chaintech Media Riser) slot. The CMR slot is shared with the board's bottom PCI slot and is designed to work with the Zenith 9CJS's port expansion card.

Instead of providing access to extra expansion ports with a stack of PCI back plate headers, Chaintech does it all with a single CMR card. The card provides two Firewire ports, a digital S/PDIF output port, and three analog audio jacks for the board's 7.1-channel sound system.

The rest of the Zenith 9CJS's board-mounted ports are found in the rear cluster, which includes serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports, four USB ports, dual Ethernet ports, and three analog audio ports. Sadly, the board doesn't support a digital S/PDIF input to match its digital output, which is a little disappointing for a high-end motherboard in this price range. Even Abit's relatively inexpensive BH7 (under $80 online) has digital output and input ports.