Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

Chaintech 9BJAQ

Click to Enlarge

We alluded to earlier in the review that there was only one motherboard we had problems with during our testing.  The Chaintech board performed very sporadically when we outfitted it with 3 SDRAM DIMMs thus populating all of its memory banks; the board was unstable and sometimes wouldn't even make it past the POST screen.  The only way to solve this problem was to either remove one DIMM or run the memory clock at 100MHz; we chose the latter in order to stick with our 384MB test configuration.

There's not much else that's too special about this board; the problem we ran into was definitely unacceptable from a board among competitors that are running so flawlessly.  Hopefully Chaintech will fix the problem before too many users get their hands on motherboards.