Ginger6 ND400 review

Ginger6’s ND400 is a budget base unit (there’s no monitor) that uses AMD’s quad-core 2.9GHz Fusion A8-3850 processor. Like other Llano processors, its integrated graphics capabilities are good, with an AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics processor built into the chip. It managed 18.9fps out of it in Dirt 3 at 1,280×720. Further quality reductions produce a smoothly playable frame-rate, so you’ll be able to play most recent 3D games, albeit without them looking their best.

The bad news is that the A8-3850 packs less of a punch than the Core i5 processors found in similarly priced PCs. It returned an overall score of 67 in our benchmarks – that’s enough to handle any desktop task you’re likely to throw at the ND400, but it’s half the performance of an overclocked Core i5-2500K.

Given the low price, we can just about forgive this, but it’s a shame the ND400 has no other outstanding features to make up for it. The DVD writer is no surprise – a Blu-ray drive would squeeze the budget too much. The Asrock A75M-HVS motherboard is the real disappointment as it doesn’t provide much scope for expansion. There are just two memory slots, both of which are occupied by 2GB modules. There’s a PCI-E x16 slot, with a PCI-E x1 slot above it and a PCI slot below. The latter will almost certainly be blocked if you install a typical graphics card, though. You’ll probably also need an adaptor, as the power supply lacks PCI-E power connectors. Four spare SATA ports mean you can add plenty of internal storage to the three free 31/2in bays (two of which are external) and one free 51/4in bay. The installed 1TB hard disk is big enough to keep most users going for a long time, anyway.