Since Chaintech Reloaded 2003
is most obviously a Chaintech event, the assembled media including ourselves
were quite eager to get our hands on some of Chaintech's latest
and greatest products. While there was an excellent assortment of the current crop
of Chaintech Zenith, Apogee, and Sumitt mainboards, there wasn't much on the
way of exciting as-yet-unreleased gear except for a brief glimpse of
Chaintech's upcoming
Athlon64 mainboard.
The Athlon64 board should be
hitting store shelves this fall to be on target with AMD's
scheduled release plans for September 2003.
Chaintech classify their boards according to Blue,
Green, Yellow and Orange colour schemes. Currently, the Zenith(which consists of
the best available chipset) landscape looks something like this.
The 9CJS is Chaintech's i875 Canterwood
edition.
The Chaintech 7NJS Ultra is their nForce2
mainboard.
The Chaintech 9EJS1 is the i845PE mainboard and the
Chaintech 8NJS Ultra is the upcoming Crush K8 board. On the Apogee side of the
fence Chaintech showed off their 9PJL i865PE mainboard and nForce2
solution.
The Chaintech 7NJL1 is based on the nForce2-Ultra
chipset.
Also on display was the very
tasty Apogee GFX5900 Videocard shown here.
Chaintech package a small
mountain of things in with this card, including a full set of cables,
DVI-to-Analog converter, some bundled games and even a dust ball for cleaning
the computer screen.
The Apogee line of videocards
are not based on TSOP-II 3ns memory according to company representatives
but rather 2.2ns BGA DDR RAM. The cards are shown without any cooling
apparatus attached, but do indeed come with a fan duct and blowers which are
designed to create as little noise as possible.
Retail prices of the Chaintech
5900 Ultra (256MB) are expected to be $499, and $399 for the 128MB
version.