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Chaintech 7NJL6 Socket A Motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 2900+

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 | Motherboard Reviews, Reviews

This package quite a highly specced motherboard and processor combination. Buying them together allows suppliers to move a little more stock and so passes on some savings to you.

The motherboard itself can be moved up to 400MHz safely allowing for good speeds. As the motherboard can go up to 400MHz, the processor itself can be set to as high as 200MHz. Up to 3GB of DDR400/PC3200 RAM memory can be used in this computer.

Other connections in the computer include up to ATA133 and also Serial ATA (SATA) capabilities. SATA is used for the newest and fastest hard drives.

The board also includes built in sound, 8 USB ports, a place to plug in a floppy drive, 2 IDE headers for up to four hard drives and DVD or CD drives. There is room to expand to 2 SATA devices like hard drives.

Graphics can be handled more than adequately by the AGP 8x slot. AGP 8x is the fastest you can get for graphics cards before having to switch to the newer, more highly priced PCI express.

The Chaintech motherboard itself does not come with an IO shield, which is the metal part that covers the space between the plug holes at the back of the computer.

The AMD Athlon XP 2900+, which uses a Barton Core is an OEM processor. It comes with 512KB of Cache. Although this speed of processor is unusual reports have it that it does perform up to speed. It does require a fan, an 80mm model with a good heatsink will do the trick nicely, as this combination does NOT come with a fan.

You can set the bus frequency to 200MHz to speed things up even more. Overclocking is not a problem either, with some people running it up as fast as 3200+.

One thing to consider is the fact that it does not come with any software that can be used to show the temperature of the chip. This is easily overcome by downloading the program Speedfan, which can be found at http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php. It is a freeware program that does a fantastic job at monitoring everything that has heat sensors in the computer, it can also control fans and you can set their high and low speeds. Check it out, as it is a good resource anyway.

In conclusion… While the combination is on discount, at the moment at a hundred bucks it is well worth the money. But if the price goes up to it’s original of a hundred and eighty, I would suggest still looking around to see what else you can find and decide from there.