Chaintech was brought back to life as a motherboard brand with the help and partnership of Colorful after a couple of years away from that market. This cooperation has resulted in a new motherboard that doesn’t really know if it wants to be in the overclocker or gaming category, so the iGame Z97 just covers them both.
The first thing that strikes us is the full-cover water cooling setup ranging from the chipset and southbridge all the way up over the VRM. Speaking of the VRM, Chaintech used a 16-phase VRM around the LGA 1150 socket.
It has three PCI-Express x16 Gen. 3 and four PCI-Express x1 Gen 2 slots, six SATA3 ports and a combo mSATA port. Network connection is provided by the Atheros KillerNIC E2200 Gigabit Ethernet controller and the onboard sound is an 8 channel 7.1 surround sound setup with Voice Gamer and solid capacitors. For iGPU users it has a DVI, D-Sub and HDMI connector although I doubt anyone with a motherboard like this would use the iGPU.
The new motherboard features a dual-BIOS with a “feature-rich” setup program. The board is planned for launch on the European and APAC markets, but no other word on pricing and availability yet.
Thanks to TechPowerUp for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of TechPowerUp
Chaintech, Now here’s a brand I completely forgot existed just like Jetway and Epox.
I don’t know why I get a bad vibe the moment I see “feature-rich” in quotes. Are we going to get a review on this?