Intel 845E Motherboard Roundup - August 2002

Chaintech 9EJL

Originally the 9EJL was supposed to debut months ago, but now it looks as if it will never see the light of day. However, we'll share some of the experience we had with this motherboard anyway, just so you know how it stacks up with the rest of the 845E motherboards.

Chaintech smartly went with the HighPoint HPT372 chip for RAID 0, 1, and RAID 0 +1 arrays. There's not much in the way of additional ports beyond USB 2.0. No 1394a (FireWire) was implemented.

The 9EJL utilizes the native LAN and sound features of the 845E chipset, which is more than adequate.

There are a total of 5 PCI slots available for expansion on the 9EJL, in addition to 2 DIMM slots for up to 2.0GB of memory.

Stressing the 9EJL

For the most part, the 9EJL ran through Prime95 (torture tests) and other programs fairly easily. I didn't experience any issues running games or benchmarks, but the 9EJL couldn't handle even slightly aggressive memory timings when running Prime95. The 9EJL failed Prime95 three times when memory timings were set to 2, 2, 2, 6. However, on default settings and timings, we were able to run our entire benchmark suite continuously, and everything else seemed to be operating correctly. We don't know the exact cause for the Prime95 failures, but there's the possibility (as with any motherboard we test) that the board itself was defective.