Biostar TA790GXB3 AM3 790GX DDR3 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2010-05-08
·
1,021 words · ~5 min read
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so I'll be having a look at a board from biostars T Series this is a TA 790 GX B3
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so that means it's a 790 GX motherboard it has support for the thenm 2 X4
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processor and DDR3 it also has support for a bunch of other sort of standard
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features like SATA 2 uh HD audio DVI
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gigabit Ethernet and let's have a look at the back so you can see they've
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they're calling out some of their of their features so you've got onboard
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power and reset buttons Japanese solid capacitors okay some about an
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overclocking utility and then default three overclocking modes in the BIOS oh
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that's kind of neat so they've got some overclocking profiles in the BIOS the
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thing about a biostar board is that you're not going to tend to see a whole lot of unnecessary bells and whistles
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but what you do get is a solid board at a very very reasonable price so here's
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the users manual which is mostly in English and then uh I think includes
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yeah includes some some random stuff Japanese Arabic Russian polish
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Portuguese Spanish Italian and French and German but that's only like the
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index it doesn't actually include any of the instructions in those languages so
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there you go and then we've got a drivers and utilities CD okay download
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the latest off the biostar website don't bother using that then we have one Molex
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to SATA power adapter two SATA cables that are yellow and one IDE cable and
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that comes in a nice little uh cable P velcro thing that you can use for cable
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management in your case when you're done installing the motherboard we've got an
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IO Shield all right and then let's get
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to the motherboard itself so while the packaging leaves a little bit to be
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desired you'll find that like all bio star
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boards once I get the tape off once I get the tape off come off
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tape wow that's a long piece of tape that they're using you know just in case
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the package flies away okay so once you
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get the board itself out it's a fairly sharp uh sharp looking board so they've
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used like a green orange and blue color scheme for this one and so why don't we
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start with the CPU socket you got support for am3 CPUs which includes the
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965 Black Edition AMD's current Flagship
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CPU okay then you've got 1 two three
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four I'm not sure how many phases the power design is but it looks like
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somewhere between four and five based on how many of these there are all right so
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then we've got control we've got support
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for your typical DDR3 dual Channel memory so four slots for that and then
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we have our power connectors in their usual ideal locations with the 24 pin
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along the right hand Edge and the four pin power connector up at the top left
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now in terms of SATA connectors we've got see this is the kind of thing this
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that you will tend to see a little bit on value boards is that the layouts
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might not be exactly optimal so you can see that the top SATA port is actually
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going to be covered by a dual slot fulllength graphics card now if you have
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a single slot graphics card then you're good to go you can use all six of the
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SATA 2 connectors but if you do have a dual slot graphics card you can probably
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only use five of them shouldn't be that big of a deal you got your clear clear
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SEO switch here one IDE port here are your onboard power and reset switches as
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well as your color-coded front panel switches three USB 2.0 front panel
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headers I really like that I don't think two is enough because a lot of cases
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have four front USB and then if you want to even have like a card reader and then
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and then yeah exactly that's it so if you wanted to have a card reader you
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wouldn't be able to but if you have three headers you can have four front
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USB and a card reader I love that so then we've got a floppy connector here
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then in terms of expansion ports we've got one PCI Express 16x slot two PCIe 1X
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slots and three PCI because again it's a value board so you're going to be
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expecting someone using this as like an upgrader board to have some Legacy PCI
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stuff that they want to carry forward with them you can see there is a dinky
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little heat sink on this chipset right here and that's all that's really
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necessary for it but then we've got a fairly beefy looking uh fairly large
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heat sink on the actual 790 GX chipset itself so that pretty much oh no okay
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there's one auxiliary power here so that's just I think this is going to be
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highly optional okay so it's only if you're running an extremely high
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powerered graphics card here um and even then you probably don't need to use that
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so then on the back okay like most 790 GX boards we do have support for onboard
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Graphics we've got DVI and VGA and then we have two PS2 ports 4 USB 1 GB
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Ethernet and then we have support for
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wow okay I haven't seen a a board with a 790 GX chipset that only has three audio
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ports so microphone headphones and then I believe that's a line in or line out
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and I think you can also use software to configure it for 5.1 with no mic so
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thank you for checking out my quick unboxing of the TA 790 GX
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B3