Chaintech Reloaded

Manufacturer: Chaintech
Supplied by: n/a
Street Price: n/a

by Dean Barker (5/26/2003)

Introduction

Last weekend Brian and I had the pleasure of attending the Chaintech Reloaded event in New Orleans.  Chaintech has been around for a good while now, since 1986 to be exact.  Chaintech has decided it wants to be the top dog on the street and has shifted resources around to be just that.  Their new focus is on the ultra high end and the budget market with few middle of the road products. 

The Summit product lines we are somewhat familiar with.  An example being the Chaintech Summit 7NIF2 mainboard Brian reviewed here in March.  These are the budget lines that offer the same quality as the high end stuff just not the same package of extras, tweaks and frills.  Chaintech is also putting a lot of attention on their top shelf products to try and wrest the performance crown from the more mainstream manufacturers.  With this type of push, the people who benefit the most are you and me, with incredible feature rich products due to hit the shelves in the near future.  The top of the line products will carry the name "Zenith" while the second tier of their high end product line will be called "Apogee."  The Apogee line is in the same vein as the Zenith but some cost constraints were put into place, meaning a few less features.  This was done to make the line attractive to the performance junkie who may not want a full spectrum of features and the extra cost they add to a product.

Who is Chaintech

Let me take a second to give you an overview of Chaintech as a company.  Chaintech was founded in 1986.  It is a multinational company with seven offices worldwide employing over 1000 people.  They are head quartered in Taipei, Taiwan with manufacturing facilities in China.  I was pretty impressed when their production capacity was told to us as up to 200k mainboards per month and 250k VGA boards per month.  Chaintech does more than just make boards.  They also produce digital satellite receivers, receiver cards and a couple of new things we were shown but cannot disclose at the present.  I can tell you that one of these things is ultra cool! 

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