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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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The northbridge and southbridge chips are both covered by heatsinks, with the larger of the two on the northbridge. No heatpipe connects them, nor is one really needed. Even at full load the heatsinks do not get much more than “slightly warm”. I believe I recorded a max temperature of 113.9 degrees F while running looping benchmarks on the northbridge. Heat is not an issue with this board, but the inclusion of two good heatsinks insures that it will not overheat even when put in an area of low airflow (such as in a home theater cabinet). There are four fan headers spread about the board, and the CPU fan header features the four pin design for heatsinks and fans that utilize it. On the bottom of the board are two individual reset and power buttons, which are amazingly handy for users who test their boards outside of their cases. It is a nice feature for troubleshooting the board away from a case, or having to use jumpers to reset or start the board.
The bundle is pretty pedestrian, and the inclusion of only one SATA cable is a bit chincy. I say this only because optical SATA drives are now much more common, and the minimum amount anymore that a new user/builder needs is two. Biostar uses the Realtek RTL8111B Gig-E PCI-E chip for networking duties, and it eats up one of the PCI-E lanes that the 690G offers. This is probably one of the most inexpensive PCI-E Gig-E chips, but it is certainly able to do the job. It does not break any speed records, but the board is really not meant for heavy duty server usage. For 95% of all users, this chip is more than adequate. The integrated sound chip used for the motherboard is the Realtek ALC888. This High Definition codec features 8 channel audio and has a decent S/N ratio. Biostar took great pains to implement the cleanest audio possible. Since a motherboard is a very noisy environment, a lot of filtering is needed to isolate the sound chip and its outputs from the rest of the board. Biostar has surrounded the chip with capacitors to help filter EMI as much as possible, and each output channel has its own capacitor as well. Biostar claims a 95 dB S/N ratio with this setup, which is a damn shade better than most other boards can claim. The most impressive part of this entire board is the video output connections. On the backplate there is the VGA (DB-15), DVI, HDMI, and S-Video outputs. This is simply unprecedented, especially considering that two outputs can be used at once. There are few products out there with better video connectivity than this motherboard. The motherboard also allows the output of audio through the HDMI cable. It is a pretty compelling HTPC solution all by itself, and only improves when combined with a standalone AMD HD 2600/2400 or NVIDIA GeForce 8600/8500 graphics card. The only thing really missing from this board is a standalone SPDIF output, either in the form of coax or optical. It does feature the four analog outputs, but it is not a perfect solution for those not wanting to use HDMI for audio functionality and passthrough. Overclocking Features Micro-ATX and overclocking are not often spoken aloud in the same sentence. In this instance though, I can say this is one of the most overclocking friendly M-ATX board I have ever used. The latest BIOS features every overclocking setting a user could ask for, as well as very fine grained clock and voltage control for every individual component. One of the latest BIOS did add multiplier control over the CPU.
The board in all its glory. It is actually well laid out for a Micro-ATX board, and the placement for the connections is both logical and easily accesible. A user can actually get into big trouble by fiddling around with all of the memory settings. Most users will want to stay away from the majority of settings except for CAS, tRAS, tRCD, and tRP. Biostar also includes several settings which attempt to optimize timings, but I found I achieved better performance by disabling these particular settings. There is also an automated overclocking functionality, but I feel that particular functionality should be avoided. By lowering the CPU multiplier, memory divider, and HT multiplier, I was able to achieve a 320 MHz HT speed (960 MHz effective using the 3X multiplier). This is not all that much lower than the top speed I achieved with the aforementioned TForce 550. Using the X2 5600 that is clocked at 2.8 GHz, I was quite happy with running it at 10 x 300 MHz. When using the DDR-2 533 option in the BIOS, the memory was running at an even 1000 MHz. Frankly I was surprised by how well this board clocks. Users do need to know what they are doing to avoid hard locks, but once achieved this is a very stable board for overclocking.
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Copyright 1999-2007 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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