It's good to have an affordable mainboard coming, but this is kind of weird looking

Sep 11, 2007 09:11 GMT  ·  By

Biostar is trying to put its new line of products in the spotlight as the manufacturing company was not known to produce any high end solutions until now. The soon to come new mainboard from Biostar is said to offer a decent level of performance and overclocking abilities while maintaining the low price tag that is typical for the company. Like the older T series of mainboards, the new product from Biostar, named TX38-A7 Deluxe, aims at providing an alternative to solutions from well known manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI.

The TX38-A7 Deluxe is built around the high performance Intel X38 chipset and it looks like the manufacturing company managed to put its newly acquired ex Abit engineers to good use as the mainboard offers some surprises both concerning its design as well as its technical specifications. While available for now only as engineering samples, the mainboards based on the Intel X38 chipset from Biostar are coming with three PXI Express x16 slots, but one of the slots is only having a 4x bandwidth. As the PCI Express bandwidth is being split between the x16, x4 slots and the other components, the downside of this approach is that the mainboard may run out of bandwidth while using the two integrated Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

Apart from these features, the TX38-A7 Deluxe also integrates six Serial ATA II ports which are served by an integrated PCI Express controller. In order to cater for the needs of users that did not replace their old Parallel ATA compatible hard disk or optical drives, the mainboard also comes with a legacy PATA connector which is attached to the same controller as the SATA ports. For new expansion cards, the TX38-A7 Deluxe motherboard offers a single PCI Express x1 slot, so expandability options as somewhat reduced in that department, while offering two legacy PCI ports for older add-on cards. On the USB front, the new Biostar mainboard will offer six rear facing high speed USB ports, while integrating a 7.1-channel audio solution.

The manufacturing company said that the new mainboards will come with a decent level of performance without a high price tag and they will also offer some overclocking features. On the cooling side, the TX38-A7 Deluxe relies heavily on heatpipes that give it a rather weird and unusual looking appearance. In order to dissipate as much heat as possible without using an active cooling solution, Biostar employed the very same basic design that was used on many DFI mainboards: an external extension. While the Biostar extension is smaller and will probably be easier to fit in the back of the computer case, it may not be very effective because of its size and because the copper fins are very small.