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- Date:
- Wednesday, September 22, 2010
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:
BioStar TA890FXE Motherboard Review
BioStar is one of those companies that's generally well known for making boards which are frankly not targeted toward the enthusiast market. However that changed a few years back when they introduced their T-Force line of boards aimed at the high end. Surprisingly to us, T-Force motherboards have been solid contenders for a couple years now. How does its newest fare?
Introduction
BioStar is one of those motherboard manufacturers you don't hear about too often. Most of their products are budget oriented and the fact is their marketing is virtually non-existent on this continent. When Kyle handed me my first BioStar motherboard I had one of those, "Are you serious?" type of reactions. The board was not what I expected. It was one of the best overclockers I'd seen at that time. Since then every BioStar board from its T-Force or T-Series line has been nothing short of excellent. These aren't typically plagued by the odd quirks of some big name boards, and they often out-clock top tier offerings. Even more unfortunate is that some boards are great, but really hard to find in North America.
The TA890FXE is based on AMD's 890FX chipset and SB850 south bridge. It features the use of all solid electrolytic capacitors and supports 140watt TDP processors. SATA 6G support is native on the south bridge. The board supports ATI's Crossfire/CrossFireX technologies as well. The board's documentation does not disclose how many power phases it uses. However visual inspection shows six. There are also six red LED's which light up while the board is running and thus six makes sense. The board also features IEEE1394 support, There are 5 SATA 3G ports and 1 eSATA 3G port. The board also has Gigabit Ethernet support and 7.1 channel audio support. The board doesn't really have a lot of features and integrated components. It does have most everything you need integrated though. So to make a fully functional system all you need is an AM3 CPU, DDR3 memory, video card, drives, and a power supply.
Main Specifications Overview:
Detailed Specifications Overview:
Packaging
The packaging is as basic as it gets. The black and grey box looks nice but more importantly it does keep the contents safe in transit to wherever it needs to go. Inside the box the list of included accessories is small. You get a user's manual, driver disk, 3 SATA cables, 1 4-pin Molex to SATA power adapter, a BioStar labeled velcro strap, Crossfire bridge, and an I/O shield. That's pretty much it but it is what you need at a minimum when building a system.
Board Layout
The board itself has a goofy layout. Of course the first thing you'll probably notice is the hideous white and red on brown PCB color scheme. So right there if your case has a window, you'll probably want to look elsewhere. I'm not sure what's going on at BioStar but more than likely making a board actually look nice is far down on the list of priorities. That said, this board is not near as hideous looking as the last one we reviewed so maybe BioStar is moving in the right direction where aesthetics are concerned. The build quality is sub-par. Frankly the board's PCB is way too damn thin and way too flexible. The whole time I was moving it around to shoot photos of it or mount the cooling setup on it I was afraid I'd snap the thing in two.
The CPU socket area is actually one of the stronger points about the board's layout. Unfortunately the thickness of the PCB or lack thereof is a cause for concern. For one thing the backplate used for mounting the heat sink retention mechanism is seriously crappy. It's very flexible. I had some issues with my water cooling setup and sought to mount a Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme to the board to get setup while I fixed my water cooling system. And there is where things started to go south on me. The mounting hardware of the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme actually bent the PCB in a way which I found extremely uncomfortable. I'm honestly surprised the board continued to work like that. While screwing things in place the mounting plate that came with the board stress fractured near one of the mounting holes. So from then on I had to be even more careful with it.
The TA890FXE has properly color coded DIMM slots to let you know which slots to install your memory modules in for dual channel memory mode operation. It uses pretty standard locking tabs and is unfortunately too close to the CPU socket as usual. Then again that's par for the course with 939, AM2 and AM3/AM3+ motherboards.
The heat sink for the north bridge isn't terribly impressive. Its cheaply made but it gets the job done well enough for stock operating frequencies. Overclocked I have my doubts about it, which I'll cover in more detail later. The PWM's are linked via heat pipe to the chipset cooler and they were practically on fire. My office has an ambient temperature at the time of this writing of about 72F. At stock speeds this thing was roasting. Also the retention pin for the north bridge cooler is badly placed. It's too close to the retention tab for the first PCI-Express x16 slot.
The south bridge is cooled by a dinky passive heat sink. While it was fairly warm to the touch, it was not abnormally so and seems to get the job done well. The board's 5 SATA headers are right in front of it and directly left of it is one badly placed EIDE port.
I'll just get right down to it. The expansion area sucks. The layout is bad. The PCI-Express x16 slots seem as though they were arranged by a blind monkey. The use of the two white slots flat out blocks the use of the two red ones if you use anything with a larger dual slot cooling solution. And forget aftermarket coolers as they could block up to three of these slots. Oh and BioStar chose to use PCI-Express slots with very different retention mechanisms which make them harder to use. For example with cards installed, it is a huge pain to operate slot 3's retention lever/clip. But don't worry, those dual legacy PCI slots are less likely to be blocked so those will be there if you need them. Again I'm not sure what the hell BioStar was thinking here, but it wasn't logical whatever it was. I'd really like one of their engineers to explain this layout to me and the choice of retention mechanisms. This is just a bad design and I wouldn't recommend the board on this basis alone.
Fortunately there are no major mistakes here. The I/O panel is laid out well enough. There are 2 PS/2 ports, an optical out, SPDIF out, 6 USB ports, one RJ-45 port, 1 IEEE1394a port, and one eSATA port.
T Overclocker
BioStar packaged their T Overclocking software with the TA890FXE. The utility itself has a fairly nice interface but isn't anything special.
The program has four tabs at the top. CPU, Memory, OC Tweaker, and H/W Monitor. The CPU tab like most of them only provides information and does not actually allow for any adjustments. The CPU tab contains only information about the processor and the motherboard. The memory tab does the same for each memory module installed. You can read pretty much all the SPD informational highlights and standard timings.
The OC Tweaker tab actually has adjustable settings. There are three smaller tabs within the main window which correspond to three categories. On the default "Frequency" tab you can adjust the PCI-Express clock and the CPU clock. You can also load or save overclocking profiles which you can create. On the voltage tab a fairly large range of voltages can be adjusted. At least theoretically. I never could get the thing to work. It simply did nothing when I clicked on any value. I tried to save them as part of a profile and adjust them that way, that was a no go.
The mode tab shows presents label V3 through V15 and one auto setting. When clicking these the system would pause briefly, but it never showed any values changing. So I'm not sure what this utility is actually good for. Evidently it doesn't actually do anything. The H/W monitor tab shows current, minimum and maximum voltages. It also is capable of showing fan speeds and temperatures. So it's pretty standard in that regard. And actually that's really the only thing the program actually does. It allows for hardware monitoring but I'm not sure why you'd install it in lieu of something like RealTemp which actually works.