14 DAY TRIAL // Motherboards and graphics cards sell well enough individually, but with the right approach, a bundle offer can lead to better sales all around. This is what Biostar is attempting to do with its Gaming series.
The Gaming Z97X motherboard was specifically designed by the company to both perform well and look good. “Designed from the ground up to be cool looking and high performing” are the company's own words.
Biostar is acting on the belief that a usable gaming rig is determined by the motherboard (the basis of the system) and the VGA card which determined graphics capabilities.
The GeForce GTX 750 Ti may not be the best in NVIDIA's line, far from it really, but it does represent the highest-performing mainstream adapter in the collection. It's even based on the Maxwell architecture.
The GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Biostar's card uses 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and is compatible with the PCI Express 3.0 x16 interface. It also uses a dual-fan cooler.
DirectX 11 is fully supported, as are NVIDIA PuroVideo HD Technology NVIDIA PhyX, and NVIDIA CUDA Technology.
The Maxwell GPU boasts a memory interface of 128 bits and 640 CUDA cores, plus clocks of 1059 MHz Base and 1137 MHz Boost.
Add to that dual-DVI outputs and HDMI and you have a solid little thing to play games from. There's even a dual-fan cooler.
The Biostar Gaming Z97X motherboard
This platform supports one LGA 1150 central processing unit from Intel, a Haswell as it were, while four DDR3 memory slots back it up.
Three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots are available as well, along with PCI Express-based M.2, Dual Gigabit Ethernet LAN technology and Hi-Fi 3D Audio technology.
SATA Express technology is also present, for 12 Gbps HDDs and SSDs, but mostly SSDs, both in SATA and PCI Express form.
Availability
The Z97X Gaming motherboard + GTX 750 Ti bundle should be shipping now, along with the external Gaming Commander box that is included with the motherboard by default. Sadly, the company didn't specify the price of the set in the press announcement, so we can only wait for retailers to get on with it.
