Biostar TA890GXB HD Motherboard

Today we are going to take a look at one of the more recent motherboards from BIOSTAR's socket AM3 line up. The BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD motherboard is based on AMD's 890GX and SB850 chipsets. Utilizing AMD's 890GX chipset gives the BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD the Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics and can take advantage of ATI's Hybrid CrossfireX technology.

The BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD motherboard has a few exclusive features that are worth mentioning. One of the exclusive features is BIO-unlocKING. It isn't exactly a secret that many of the current X2 and X3 AMD processors are actually quad core processors that have had one or more cores "locked". There are multiple reasons that this has been done; it could be a bad core or that they simply didn't need any more of that particular processor at that time. Either way, BIO-unlocKING has the potential to unlock those "locked" cores and turn a processor like the AMD Phenom II X2 555 into a quad-core processor!

Another of the exclusive features is BIOSTAR "GPU" Technology. The BIOSTAR G.P.U is a green power utility. What this does is disables the extra power phases to the CPU while under light load. If you want to monitor the number of phases that the CPU is utilizing, there are two ways. The first is the onboard LED's, which is fine if the BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD isn't in a case. Once installed into a case it's not exactly practical to keep an eye on those lights.


That brings us to the second way you can monitor the power phases. There is a desktop GUI that you can install from the driver disk that will tell you how much power you are using for the processor, temperature, CPU fan speed, CPU Voltage, Wattage and, of course, number of phases.

Detail Specifications:

CPU Socket
*AM3

Supported CPU
*AMD Phenom II, Athlon II, Sempron Socket AM3

Northbridge Chipset
*AMD 890GX

Southbridge Chipset
*SB850

Front Side Bus
*Support HT3.0 up to 5.2GT/s

DIMM Sockets
*4 x DDR3 DIMM Memory Slot

Supported Memory
*Support Dual Channel DDR3 1600

Max. Memory
*Max. Supports up to 16GB Memory

Expansion Slots
* 2 x PCI Slots
* 1 x PCI-E x16 2.0 Slot

Serial ATA Controller
*6 x SATA3 6Gb/s Connector

Supported RAID
*Support SATA RAID: 0,1,5,10

Onboard VGA
*ATI Radeon™ HD4290 Graphics , Max. Memory Share Up to 512 MB

Audio
*Realtek ALC892 6-Channel Blu-ray Audio

LAN
*Realtek RTL8111E - 10/100/1000 Controller

USB
* 4 x USB 2.0 Port
* 3 x USB 2.0 Header

Display Output D-Sub, DVI, HDMI
Internal I/O
* 1 x Printer Header
* 3 x USB 2.0 Header
* 6 x SATA3 6Gb/s Connector
* 1 x Front Audio Header
* 1 x Front Panel Header
* 1 x S/PDIF-OUT Header
* 1 x CPU FAN Header
* 2 x System FAN Header
* 1 x Serial Header
* 1 x CIR Header

External I/O
* 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
* 4 x USB 2.0 Port
* 1 x HDMI Connector
* 1 x DVI-D Connector
* 1 x VGA Port
* 1 x RJ-45 Port
* 3 x Audio Connector