Chaintech 7NJS Zenith & Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro Motherboard Review

nForce2 Showdown - The Chaintech 7NJS Zenith and The Leadtek K7CRN18D-Pro

The Chaintech 7NJS Zenith (SPP/MCP-T) goes head-to-head with the Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro (SPP/MCP-T) in Tom Laverriere’s review @ hothardware.com

What the original nForce was lacking, the new nForce2 has picked up. With its new SPP ( System Platform Processor ) Northbridge and MCP-T ( Media & Communication Processors ) Southbridge, these boards pack lots of goodies from IEEE-1394a Firewire to ATA 133 and most importantly official support for Dual Channel DDR400 memory. We’re talking about some serious memory bandwidth going on here. With all that said, we could be in for interesting benchmarking. Let’s take a look at these two bad boys.Chaintech 7NJS Zenith Analysis:
Where can I start with the Chaintech board? There is so much to talk about. For starters, It has great features and an amazing bundle. The Chaintech is impressive from the start, right after opening the box. You get rounded IDE cables, a front panel with USB 2.0 and Firewire ports and a Firewire card. Not to mention everything is gold plated for a nice look, although that opinion will vary with each individual. This motherboard’s features left nothing out. We have SATA RAID, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, FireWire, and USB 2.0, AGP 8X, and official DDR400 support. All this comes at a price though and the Chaintech does have a price entry point well above most motherboards in its class, but the value is there. I would have liked to see a second Ethernet jack to take advantage of the 3Com Ethernet MAC, but we made do. Finally, overall performance was excellent. Although we didn’t get the overclock we’d like to see in such a feature-rich motherboard, I wasn’t using aftermarket cooling or PC3500 memory modules. With that said, this is a great board for anyone looking to assemble a top of the line AMD platform.

Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro:
What the the Leadtek lacked in its bundle and feature set, it made up for in performance. While we didn’t see all the fancy trimmings that came along with the Chaintech board, we did get a solid standard issue package. The Leadtek performed as well as and even better, in some cases, than the Chaintech board. There are some shortcomings with the board though. Again, we’d like to see a second Ethernet jack, but if you are looking for a board that is going to be able to support the upcoming technologies, the Leadtek doesn’t have it right up front. With the lack of SATA or RAID, if you need this feature, you’re talking about having to buy an adaptor, which adds to the total cost of the package. On the upside however, you’re getting a very stable, well built product that offers some great features such as AGP 8X, USB 2.0, IEEE-1394a Firewire, and official Dual Channel DDR400 support. In addition, all this at a great price. When you can have the Leadtek at about $80 cheaper than the Chaintech, that add in SATA or RAID card doesn’t seem so bad after all.