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The X2 3600 Newegg Combo |
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Featuring the Biostar T-Force 550 |
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by Josh Walrath |
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So far one of the few ways to get one of the new 65 nm X2 3600 processors is to purchase it through Newegg along with a bundled motherboard. At first this idea is not terribly attractive to most users, as often as not the bundled boards are of substandard quality and not exactly feature rich. When I ordered this combo I was not expecting a whole lot out of the motherboard, but I was hoping that the new 65 nm X2 would overclock to a good degree. Things turned out slightly different than what I was expecting. To see my initial impressions of the X2 3600+ running on an Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe, go here.
A classy looking box that can still catch the eye when on the shelf. Biostar has been providing motherboards for years, and recently they introduced their first video cards. It is a well known brand, and they make some quality products. In the past Biostar has never been considered an enthusiast brand by any stretch of the imagination. Typically their products were very basic in terms of flexibility and overclocking. This does not mean their past products were not feature packed for the time, but they were simply not exciting to the enthusiast. In the past few years things have changed. Now Biostar offers their T-Force series of motherboards which are aimed more at the enthusiast and retail crowd. No longer are Biostar boards the boring green and tan of yesteryear, instead they have adopted striking colors for many of the slots and components as well as a soothing blue PCB.
The AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ in question. This turned out to be a pretty nifty chip at a very low price. The T-Force 550 is based on the NVIDIA nForce 5 550 chipset. This is the basic midrange nForce offering, but it still has a very robust featureset. It has 4 SATA-2 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 20 PCI-E lanes, and RAID 0,1,0+1 support. It does not have the advanced Ethernet functionality that the 570 Ultra and above products have (such as dual Gig-E, TCP/IP acceleration, teaming, Dualnet, and First Packet). It is a single chip solution, and as such it doesn’t take up a lot of real estate on the motherboard. The Package I was honestly not expecting a lot out of the T-Force 550, but the entire package took me by surprise. The board does not have extra features like Firewire, wireless network support, or anything else that would increase the price of the board. It has all the features of the nForce 5 550 chipset enabled, as well as the Realtek HD Audio controller. In this day and age, it is a very basic motherboard, hence its $79 US price tag.
The mesh bag Biostar includes to hold the bundle has garnered quite a bit of praise as well as disdain here and there. Personally I love it. The box it comes in is very pleasing to the eye. Nothing obnoxious about it, no spaceships, no scantily clad futuristic women or angry men adorn the box. Inside the box the bundle is very basic. The manual, driver CD, one SATA cable, one SATA power cable, one floppy cable, one IDE cable, and the ATX backplate. What is really nice about the bundle is that it is all enclosed in a black mesh bag. This keeps everything very neat and tidy, and removing the bundle from the box to get to the motherboard is quite easy and a very welcome change. Usually the user has to dig around quite a bit to get everything out of the way to get to the board, but by using this handy mesh bag it makes organizing the bundle very easy and pleasant. I realize this seems silly, but once the user actually picks up the big and rummages around a bit, they can honestly appreciate how nice it really is.
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