Chaintech denies mobo biz exit

Chaintech today announced its latest Intel-oriented motherboard, just days after it refuted claims it was quitting the mobo market.

Its statement was prompted by Taiwanese press reports that, following memory module maker Walton's move to acquire 25 per cent of the company, it would be focusing solely on DIMM production.

Not so, it responded - it will continue to offer motherboards and graphics cards, but will also move into the memory module business too.

The Zenith VE V945P motherboard is pitched at dual- and single-core Pentium processors and is based on Intel's 945P chipset. It's aimed at relatively high-end home entertainment roles. It supports up to 4GB of 533MHz or 667MHz DDR 2 SDRAM, and frontside bus speeds up to 1066MHz. There's a PCI Express x16 slot for graphics, backed up with twin PCIe x1 slots and three 32-bit PCI slots for older devices.

The board supports four Serial ATA 2 devices, and while the chipset incorporates an UltraDMA-33/66/100 IDE port, Chaintech has added a separate IDE controller to bring the port total up to three. The two additional ports support RAID 0 and 1.

The ATX-oriented V945P has Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, audio jacks for 7.1-channel audio output and an S/PDIF digital output port. The audio sub-system is Intel's HD Audio.

According to Chaintech, the V945P will ship later this month for around $119. ®