So today we're going to be having a look at a board from biostar okay so biostar
boards are they're never the the most
premium motherboard on the market but what they do represent is an incredibly
good value a stable overall board and
really an incredibly good value because you'll get features on a bio star board
within the same price point that you just wouldn't see from pretty much any
other brand so this particular board is the a p-55 board it's their T5 X e
motherboard it does support Crossfire just like most p-55 boards but the
difference is that most of the other boards in this price point only have one
PCIe slot so they obviously can't support Crossfire so let's have a quick
look here at what the overall features are the bioex uh so it's got green power
efficiency 100% extreme durable capacitors uh unique pwm design so it's
called tweak Tech easy BIOS update by USB flash disc that's a huge one this is
so convenient it makes it a huge difference overclocking Navigator engine
rapid switch to shut down or restart the system you just have so I'm guessing
that's onboard switches I guess we'll we'll find out you know what why don't
we just open this thing up oh wait no this is pretty good okay BIOS relif
resume crushed BIOS by USB flash dis that is terrific okay so let's get this
opened up it supports core i7 as well as Core i5 and core I3 processors like all
p55 boards so let's see what we've got for accessories first of all they've
included two SA cables one Molex to SATA power adapter and then one IDE cable and
they've included it with this Nifty little blue uh velcro biostar cable tie
that's kind of nice so now you can go ahead and take that off your cables and
then use that to uh help manage the cables inside your case that's terrific
okay that's well thought out okay then we've got an IO sheet uh I/O plate so
you can see that you've actually got to pop these out yourself which is I
haven't seen that one in a little while okay so then you've got to use manual
which is wow that's some pretty good languages we got there cameraman's
iPhone's going off I think he's going to try and escape and go find out what it
is wow this has like Arabic languages oh no I even got it right this is Arabic
they have like everything in here polish that's awesome Portuguese Spanish
French German oh and then like it's like 90% English Okay um that works for me
let's have a look at the board itself so let's get this out right away here got
one little piece of tape holding it on all right so the actual board itself you
can see that even though the Box might not be the nicest they haven't skimped
on the overall quality and look of the board so you've got large heat sinks in
the places where they belong so on the voltage Regulators which looks like a
four-phase setup okay and then they've also got a nice decent looking heat sink
on the chipset itself I mean this is uh it's a p-55 chipset it doesn't use up a
whole lot of power so you don't need to worry too much about that so let's start
with the CPU socket like all p55 boards it's got an LGA 1156 socket so that has
support for core i7 Core i5 and core I3 but you should note that for Core i5 and
core I3 processors you won't have support for their onboard graphics with
a p-55 board now like all p55 boards
we've got support for dual Channel DDR3 four slots and then you've got your
power connectors in their ideal locations with the 24 pin on the right
hand Edge and the four pin up at the top left now this is something that I'm
really happy to see on a value board because that's a lot of the time the
little inconveniences that you start to run into on value boards is they won't
have the power connectors in the right places or they they won't have things
well fought out in terms of the ports now let's keep moving down the board
here so we've got one IDE port here and then we've got a legacy floppy Port way
down here all right so in terms of SATA 2 we have six SATA 2 and these are
running off of the chipset now actually there you go I just said sometimes the
port layouts are not ideal on a value board and that's what we're seeing here
because if you actually install two dual
slot graphics cards in this motherboard you will block the top three SATA ports
unless you're using right angle connectors on them so then you've got
your color-coded front panel connectors a power switch and a reset onboard
switch I really like to see that again on a value board like this two front USB
headers and then expansion slots why don't I just hold the camera so the
cameraman can go in answer his phone just get that okay he just turned it off
okay so then we've got a PCI Express 16x two PCI Express 1X another pcii Express
16x like all p-55 boards these will run at 8X 8X and Crossfire then we have two
PCI slots and let's just move around to the back and see what we've got for Io
so it includes two PS2 ports one for the mouse and one for the keyboard six USB
2.0 ports 1 GB Lan and 7.1 audio so no
frills no gimmicks just a like many
biostar well actually I should say almost all biostar t- series boards in
the past have been great performers for the dollar they don't have the gimmicky
features but what they do have is good value the features you really need to
get the performance out of your system and I just thought now we'd take a quick
look at this thing and on the back there's a back plate thanks for checking it out