We spoke with Chaintech about their current and future motherboard line. It seems that Chaintech is taking on the motherboard market on all fronts. They are building boards for reliability, performance and tweakability with broad feature sets, but all at a competitive price.
Chaintech ensures reliability through their AIRBAG2000 system and onboard IDE RAID.
AIRBAG2000 consists of (A) anti-virus software, (IR) instant recovery in BIOS, (B) BIOS protection, and (AG) an applications group. Their boards come bundled with two pieces of anti-virus software, Trend's PC-cillin and Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus. Instant recovery is a piece of software linked to Chaintech's BIOS that stores a backup of your software and OS in hidden directories on your hard disk. If something bad happens to your OS, it enables you to instantly recover with your programs intact. BIOS protection comes in multiple parts. First, the BIOS can be write protected. Second, certain Chaintech boards are available with twin BIOS chips, in case one gets corrupted. The applications group is a suite of software that, depending on the user, may or may not be useful. Of special note are X-STOP, a porn blocking application, and Shepherd2000, which lets you set hardware monitoring.
On the IDE side, many Chaintech motherboards include on board RAID support, for levels 0, 1, and 0+1. Level 0, or striping, spreads your data between two drives and reads and writes the data from the two drives simultaneously. This gives you a nice disk speed boost. Level 1, or mirroring, gives you a complete duplicate of all your data on a second drive. If one of your drives goes down, you can continue to work without skipping a beat. Of course, you do have to purchase two drives for level 1. Level 0 and 1 can be used together so that you mirror a striped pair of drives with another striped pair. This gives you both a performance boost and reliability.
We spoke with Chaintech about FireWire and about the chances of FireWire coming to their motherboards. Right now, they offer FireWire in a riser add-on card. Down the road, things may change. The problem is that, right now, the Texas Instruments FireWire chip, often considered the best on the market, costs around $12 a chip. When you consider the volume of motherboards produced, $12 would add a massive amount to the overall cost of manufacturing. Chaintech told us that they believe the industry would accept FireWire when chip prices are closer to the $5 range. Frankly, we can't wait.