Biostar TA790GX A2+

Justin Robinson investigates this biological star in rectangle form.

Similar to last month’s review of a BIOSTAR board, we got another one in to see if they can have the same success with an AMD platform. With a very different chipset and CPU socket, there are very many complex and niggling issues that could go wrong when actually designing one of these boards, so let’s find out if this has any.

The CPU socket area is very spacious, with a lot of room around three sides – only falling short due to its proximity to the first memory slot, where the heatsink used during testing (Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme) interfered with the stick physically being placed into the slot. It’s a small consolation that the stock mounting bracket is very sturdy, and has screws to hold it together as opposed to the pushpins that many other manufacturers rely upon. This is a great choice, especially if your aftermarket cooler uses this bracket to mount onto the CPU, ensuring that it will remain sturdy even during transport.
The memory slots are spaced quite closely together, but this will only cause an issue with oversized DIMMs (or if you’re one of those crazy people who have to watercool four sticks of memory at once). We also point out here the use of a 4-pin CPU power cable, which could possibly be an issue with high overclocks, though we didn’t experience any instability during testing. The 24-pin socket is here as well, placed in a very good area for many cases with a hole cut out in the mobo tray specifically for the 24-pin cable, and an IDE port just under this.

Power and reset buttons are in the bottom corner, which make it much easier to bench and even troubleshoot while in or out of a case; even the front panel headers are colour coded and very well labelled – great for connecting those cables without touching the manual. USB headers as well as a serial and parallel headers are along the bottom, with audio also here. This is good news for cabling, as most cases should reach these headers along the bottom, out of the way of airflow or expansion cards.

The heatsinks that cool the board are made of copper, but are almost pink in colour – suggesting that they might simply be copper plated aluminium.
Irrespective of their materials, these heatsinks do a good job keeping things cool while running, though they did get a little toasty while overclocked; this can be fixed with a little airflow over them.