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Biostar TForce TA690G Review |
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Good things in small packages… |
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by Josh Walrath |
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Back in February I was able to review my first Biostar product and the TForce 550 turned out to be a gem of a board; solid, quick, and a good overclocker for a very low price. Biostar really made a good effort to design a highly flexible motherboard with plenty of BIOS tweaks, but made very smart component choices to keep the overall price low. So when given the chance to review the TA690G, I was of course wondering if Biostar could give a Micro-ATX board the same treatment. Biostar is a company that was built primarily from OEM and whitebox sales. It used to not have much of a retail presence, but it has always been considered a solid manufacturer of motherboards that are reliable and inexpensive. These previous boards were pretty vanilla, but they did what they were asked to do without much complaint. A few years back Biostar started to make a push into the retail market, and last year they released their T- series of motherboards which are aimed directly at budget enthusiasts. Even though the company is pushing for greater visibility, they continue along with a design philosophy of creating inexpensive, yet still exciting products. The boards may not have really fancy cooling features, all solid caps throughout the board, or 4+ power phases, but they do offer a lot of value in what is delivered. AMD 690G I have previously covered the 690G in my AMD Better By Design article, but a quick refresher certainly will not hurt. The 690G is an integrated chipset that was originally designed by ATI, but was released as the AMD 690G after AMD had bought ATI. The graphics core is branded the Radeon X1250, but unlike other X1xxx parts, it is not Shader Model 3.0 compliant. Rather, it is based on the older X700 graphics chip which featured SM 2.0 functionality. The X1250 graphics portion contains 4 ROPS, 4 Pixel Shaders, and 2 Vertex Shaders. It also features the full Avivo functionality, and if a fast enough processor is used the chip can accelerate up to 1080p video. The non-integrated portion of the 690G northbridge handles the HT connection to the CPU, the PCI-E 16X connection for graphics, and 4 PCI-E lanes that can be configured as needed by the motherboard manufacturer. The most common setup is to have the PEG slot and one 1x PCI-E lane. The extra PCI-E lane will then most often connect to a PCI-E Gig-E network chip, and the last two connect the northbridge to the southbridge.
Love it or hate it, the entire bundle comes in a nice mesh bag. The southbridge functionality is provided by the SB600 chip. This is a pretty basic southbridge which features 2 x PATA ports, 4 x SATA 2 ports, the PCI bus, and 10 USB 2.0 ports. The chip supports up to RAID 5 in software, but it is not a big feature for the market it is aimed at. The TA690G I was not entirely sure what to expect with this board as I had been thoroughly impressed by what the TForce 550 offered. The first impression is of course the standard Biostar TForce series of boxes which all of their boards are packaged in. Some stickers showed that it was an AMD 690G based board with HDMI, DVI, S-Video, and VGA outputs. Opening the box revealed the mesh bag that contains the bundle. Inside are the manual, driver CD, ATX backplane, SATA cables, IDE cable, floppy cable, and a SATA power cable. Biostar is not terribly keen on producing a fantastic bundle, but it does include enough to get most users up and running. The board itself is actually quite nicely laid out. The CPU has plenty of space around it, the power connections are both located towards their respective edges of the board so they do not interfere with airflow or other component placement, and the SATA ports all are usable even when a dual slot graphics card is installed. The board feels pretty roomy, even though it is a Micro-ATX product. Even with a dual slot cooler on the graphics card, the two PCI slots are easily accessible. Power is delivered to the CPU via a 3 phase setup. Each phase utilizes polymer caps, which can increase the working lifespan of the product. All capacitors eventually stop working as the electrolyte degrades over time, but the use of polymer caps extends that. Polymer caps also are much more resistant to heat than standard electrolytic units. Biostar only uses the polymer caps in the CPU power phases, while the rest of the board uses standard electrolytic caps. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it does save on cost. Plus, the area where capacitors fail first is around the CPU, which experiences the greatest power pull and heat production.
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