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The BIOS
  
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The Phoenix Award BIOS is used with the 9EJS1 ZENITH, and unlike an upcoming review that includes this BIOS, Chaintech's implementation is much more flexable. The usual options, such as disabling onboard peripherals, and screens such as PC Health are all here.
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In the Advanced Chipset Features, you can adjust the memory timings. The memory timing options aren't bad, as you have options available for CAS latency, and Active to Precharge timing, as well as a few others.
 
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Things get more interesting in the Fequency/Voltage control. There is an option to change the multiplier, but unless you got an engineering sample, this feature will be useless for you since all retail and OEM Pentium 4 CPUs are locked. Your FSB choices are pretty good, allowing for a maximum FSB of 200. Simply key in whatever FSB you want, and you're set.
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There are options to lock down your AGP Clock, which can come in very handy when you're pushing the envelope. You can either sync it at 1/2 your FSB, or manually set it at 66, 75, and 88. The memory options are good, albeit slightly limited, but just like the AGP, you can hard code values to keep your system stable. What I would have liked to have seen is perhaps HCLK+33. This way, if you get a 155FSB, your ram will be OC'd to 183, which shouldn't be a problem with most quality DDR333 sticks.
 
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You got a bunch of voltage settings you can play with for your CPU, memory and video card. The ability to add more voltage is essential for maintaining a stable, overclocked system, and the ZENITH doesn't disappoint. You can go as high as 1.85v for the CPU, 3.1v for the memory, and 2.1v for the AGP.
I felt the BIOS was well executed, but there are a few things I found missing that should be there for the enthusiast. For the AGP, there are no settings to enable/disable Fast Writes. Some video cards can be a bit picky, and it would have been nice to have this option. For those who don't have any desire to use the RAID controller, there is no option to disable it. If you don't have any drives connected to the controller, the boot times are another 7-10 seconds longer. Finally, it's great that you have an Enable option for PCI dividers, but enabling it doesn't let you actually make any changes.
Overclocking
The Pentium 2.4B is supposed to be a great overclocker, but we never had much success with it here. Previously, our maximum stable overclock with an i845PE motherboard was 156FSB, so given it's ZENITH branding, I was curious at how the Chaintech 9EJS1 ZENITH would do. Cooling was provided by the Swiftech MCX4000, and a Delta SHE 68CFM fan, and memory speeds were dropped so that it wouldn't interfere with our motherboard OC'ing.
We started by going for 150FSB, which wasn't met with any issues, so the next step was to at least match our previous stable OC of 156FSB. Fortunently, things were going well, and 156FSB proved to be no problem. We started inching things 1MHz at a time until we settled on our maximum stable overclock. One thing we noticed after a few tests was that the ZENITH already adds about 2MHz to the the FSB, so the following screenshots are of our FSB results, plus 2.
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At 164FSB, this was an 8FSB improvement over our last test. We did have to push the vCore up to 1.75, but the system proved to be quite stable. We were able to POST at 165FSB, and boot into Windows, but the system would continue to lockup, despite increasing vCore to 1.85v. At 166FSB, the system would POST, but never get into Windows. With an 18x multiplier, I was wondering if our 2.4GHz CPU was limiting us, so I grabbed a 2.8GHz engineering sample (pay attention to the name strings) and decreased the multiplier. Like I've already mentioned, this is not something most people can do (P4s are locked), but being a motherboard review, I was curious to see what the maximum FSB the ZENITH was capable of...
We were able to POST at 16x200, but no luck in getting into Windows. Dropping down to as low as 12x200 didn't fare any better. I decided to stick with a 16 multiplier for now, and drop the FSB one MHZ at a time until I could get stability.
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At 190FSB, the system was as stable as a rock. I dropped back to a 12x multiplier to see if I could push it more, but at all multipliers (under 16), the system began to get unstable at 191 and up. With a 17 multiplier, we were forced to drop our FSB to 187.
Assuming you're using a 2GHz and up CPU, it's unlikely most people will hit 190FSB with their P4 using air cooling. Still, the fact that it did work at that speed with a 16x multiplier, and the fact that we were able to at least POST at 200FSB, the ZENITH does have good OC potential. Overall, I think that the ZENITH did very well in the overclocking tests, and perhaps with more aggressive cooling, we would have had more success above 190FSB.
Test Setup
Chaintech 9EJS1 Zenith: Pentium 4 2.4B (18x133: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, Intel Application Accelerator v2.3, ATi Catalyst 3.0
MSI i845PE Max2-FIR: Pentium 4 2.4B (18x133: 2.4GHz), 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, Intel Application Accelerator v2.3, ATi Catalyst 3.0
Both testbeds have their CPU and memory BIOS settings set to their optimal state. Both motherboards had the ram set at DDR333, but on the ZENITH, the memory was set to "Auto333", meaning it'll run at the FSB of the CPU. Considering the slight OC out of the box, the memory will get a "free" boost.
Test software will be:
SiSoft Sandra 2003
PC Mark 2002
PiFast
3D Mark 2001SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2
For the SiSoft Sandra tests, we'll also toss in some 190FSB numbers to show you the overclocking performance.
Except for 3D Mark, all game tests are done at 640x480 to eliminate the video card as a possible bottleneck (though the Radeon 9700 will not likely have any problems at any resolution). Quake 3 and Jedi Knight 2 were run at "Fastest" settings.
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Chaintech 9EJS1 ZENITH 845PE: zenith: n. - the highest point; peak; acme: the zenith of someone's achievements. Will the Chaintech 9EJS1 ZENITH be just that? We'll be investigating that today.
