A peek under the hood

Intel's latest "Canterwood" 875P chipset powers the Zenith 9CJS. I'll be touching on some of Canterwood's more interesting features as they pertain to the Zenith 9CJS, but you can also check out our review of the 875P chipset for more detail.

The 875P's most notable features include an 800MHz front-side bus, AGP 8X, and dual channels of DDR400 memory. Canterwood's dual-channel memory controller offers a whopping 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth, as does its 800MHz front-side bus. Pretty cool, eh?

Canterwood looks a lot like Intel's mid-range "Springdale" 865PE chipset, which also supports an 800MHz front-side bus, AGP 8X, and dual-channel DDR400 memory. However, the 875P north bridge also features PAT, Intel's "Performance Acceleration Technology," which the 865PE officially lacks. PAT improves performance by using more aggressive internal timings within the north bridge's memory controller. PAT functionality was initially supposed to be restricted to the 875P, but motherboard manufacturers are claiming success in enabled PAT on Intel's 865PE north bridge.

Without an exclusive PAT-fueled performance advantage, few consumers may be willing to pay the price premium for Canterwood-based products. If PAT-enabled Springdale boards are able to offer performance comparable with Canterwood, Chaintech will have to convince consumers that there's still plenty of value to justify the Zenith 9CJS's premium pricing.

The Intel ICH5R south bridge chip on the Zenith 9CJS serves up eight USB 2.0/1.1 ports, but no Firewire. The board's three Firewire ports are powered by VIA's VT6306 IEEE 1394 Firewire controller.

On the networking front, the Zenith 9CJS offers Gigabit Ethernet using the 875P north bridge's CSA (Communications Streaming Architecture) interface. Because CSA connects an Ethernet controller directly to the north bridge, users don't have to worry about the board's Gigabit Ethernet controller eating up precious bandwidth on the PCI bus or in the interconnect between north and south bridge chips. The Zenith 9CJS also features a second network port powered by Realtek's RTL8101L Fast Ethernet controller, which hangs off the PCI bus.

A little less RAID
Unlike many of today's high-end motherboards, whose storage support is handled by a smattering of chips, the Zenith 9CJS's mass storage devices all run through Intel's ICH5R south bridge.

The ICH5R serves up two ports of Serial ATA goodness backed up by a couple of ATA/100 channels. The ICH5R supports Serial ATA RAID, too. Currently, Intel's software only supports RAID 0, but RAID 1 will apparently be added in a driver release this summer.

For now, the Zenith 9CJS's RAID capabilities are limited to the ICH5R's Serial ATA RAID 0. That's a little weak for an enthusiast-oriented board in this price range. The ICH5R's support for Serial ATA RAID 0 buys the board a checkmark on its feature list, but offers least capable on-board RAID solution I've ever seen.

In a perfect world, the Zenith 9CJS would be equipped with a third-party Serial ATA RAID chip that supports RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 with up to four drives. Heck, I'd settle for an ATA/133 RAID chip that offers similar four-drive array support. As it stands, the best thing about the Zenith 9CJS's RAID support is that it works with Serial ATA drives tied directly to the south bridge. Since every motherboard that uses the ICH5R has access to the same features, storage and RAID won't be an area where the Zenith 9CJS breaks away from the pack.

Envy on board
Chaintech's Zenith 9CJS is one of the first motherboards to integrate VIA's Envy24PT audio controller. The Envy24PT is a cut down version of the Envy24HT audio chip meant for integrated applications like motherboards. Previously, we've been quite impressed with discrete audio cards based on the Envy24 and Envy24HT audio chips, so I was eager to see what Chaintech's implementation of the Envy24PT had to offer.

7.1-channel audio output is one of the Envy24PT's most advertised features, but unfortunately, this functionality will be lost on the majority of users. Of all the goodies Chaintech bundles with the Zenith 9CJS, a set of 7.1-channel speakers isn't included. In fact, I'm not aware of any PC speaker solutions supporting 7.1-channel output. Without any readily available 7.1-channel PC speaker sets, users will have to cobble together their own 7.1 systems by combining a 5.1-channel speaker set with a pair of conventional stereo speakers—not exactly an elegant solution, especially if the different speaker sets aren't perfectly matched.

In addition to its support or 7.1-channel audio output, the Envy24PT supports 24-bit audio input and output at 96kHz. The Envy 24PT's 24-bit/96kHz audio support isn't quite as sexy as the Envy24HT's support for 24-bit audio at up to 192kHz, but it's still a step above typical integrated motherboard audio solutions.

Unfortunately, any claim that the Zenith 9CJS supports 24-bit audio support is a little misleading because Chaintech pairs the Envy24PT audio chip with VIA's VT1616 codec chip; the VT1616 is a part of VIA's "Vinyl Audio" family, and it only supports 18-bit audio input and output at sampling rates up to 48kHz. Any 24-bit/96kHz audio streams that pass through the codec's digital-to-analog or analog-to-digital converters would have to be sampled down to 18-bit/48kHz. The VT1616 isn't exactly a high-end codec chip, either. I wouldn't expect the audio quality to be on par with discrete Envy24-based cards that use high-end DACs.

Just to keep things interesting, the Zenith 9CJS's CMR card features a Wolfson WM8728 DAC, which is cable of handling 24-bit audio up to 192kHz. Since the VT1616 doesn't have enough output channels to handle 7.1-channel audio by itself, and since the CMR card only has center and rear analog output ports, I suspect the WM8728 is there to perform DAC duties for the Envy24PT's extra output channels. A high-precision DAC like the WM8728 should yield better audio quality than the VT1616, but if the DAC only powers the board's center and rear outputs, it won't help with music playback. It might be possible to route stereo music playback through the WM8728, but the audio drivers offer no such functionality.

Unfortunately, I don't have a set of digital speakers to test the Zenith 9CJS's high-fidelity output. However, I did log some time listening to music through the board's analog outputs, and I was actually quite impressed. With uncompressed CD audio, the Zenith 9CJS tends to muffle background sounds and take the edge off foreground instruments when compared with discrete Envy-powered audio cards. However, with high-bitrate MP3s, the difference between the Zenith 9CJS's integrated audio and high-quality discrete audio cards is less pronounced.

Of course, comparing the Zenith 9CJS's integrated audio to discrete 24-bit audio cards really isn't fair. Against the integrated competition I assembled for my casual listening tests (an nForce2 board and an ICH4-based motherboard, both with ALC650 codecs), the Zenith 9CJS's Envy24PT-powered audio definitely sounded better for music playback. In games, there was no discernable difference in audio quality between the three implementations. The only strike against the Envy24PT is its inability to encode Dolby Digital audio in real time, but to date, only NVIDIA's nForce2 APU is capable of that feat.

If the Zenith 9CJS were a massively integrated small form factor motherboard targeted at home theater PCs, I'd be more inclined to complain about the low-precision VT1616 codec. Picky audiophiles can easily fill one of the board's five PCI slots with a true 24-bit audio card that can handle 24-bits at 96KHz or 192kHz on all output channels, but I imagine that the majority of users will be nothing short of impressed with the Zenith 9CJS's built-in audio.