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Chaintech 7NJL6 AMD Sempron 3000+ Barebone Kit PC

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 | Desktop Computer Reviews, Reviews

For a smidgen under 200 dollars with the rebates that come with this computer, it is a steal in terms of the value you get. Even at its usual price in the mid 300s it is worth a close look when building a custom desktop computer.

The case is nothing to write home about, but is functional, doing what it is supposed to do, and that is hold all the part nicely in place. One thing that is good is the 425-watt power supply. Power supplies are one of the places where manufacturers often cut corners to make their products cheaper. This powerful power supply will provide enough power for any components you wish to add to the system.

The motherboard is a Chaintech 7NJL6 nVidia Socket A ATX motherboard as the name of the computer might suggest. It supports Socket A chips like the AMD Sempron that it comes with, but also the AMD Athlon XP, which could be an option for upgrading the computer in the future.

It supports up to 400MHz front side bus. Memory can be supported up to 400MHz. Audio is onboard and there is AGP 8x for the video card interface.

Support for the newer SATA technology is available, and does supports up to ATA/133 which should not disappoint in terms of speed. There is also USB 2.0 for fast communication with external devices.

Other built in extras are, LAN support, Game/Midi ports, audio out jacks, line in jacks and other standard motherboard stuff. There are two spots to plug in your SATA drives and two for the IDE devices.

The Sempron processor is really a toned down version of their older chip to give a bit more of competition to Intel who have their cheap range Intel Celeron chips.

The hard drive is a 120GB Maxtor, which should provide enough storage room for anything you have. This drive is an ATA133 hard drive, which means it doesn’t take advantage of the SATA capabilities of this motherboard. It is probably a cost based decision. The drive is only a 5400RPM drive, which might see it lagging behind as a main drive. An upgrade to a SATA 7200RPM drive would speed up the computer, and keep the Maxtor for storing your data, as a second drive.

The Chaintech GeForce 64MB video card should work well, providing just enough clout to try some of those very new games. It might not be enough for the heavy gamer and would probably not make this qualify as a cheap high powered gaming computer, but is certainly a good specification at this price range.

It’s optical drive is a CD-ROM, so it can read anything on the older CD-ROM discs, but no DVDs.

The processor fan is a sturdy affair that should keep things in the computer cool. I also comes with 512MB of Ultra DDR400/PC3200 RAM memory.

A mouse and a keyboard are also part of the package.

Overall, a fantastic deal if you can get those rebates done. And still incredibly reasonable in terms of very cheap computers.

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