14 DAY TRIAL // Although there is still some time left until January 5 when Intel's Sandy Bridge processors will make their official debut, Chinese distributors have already begun shipping H67 motherboards, the Biostar TH67XE being among the very first boards to come to market.
Although pricing hasn't been established yet, according to Expreview website, the Biostar TH67XE is already available for shipping from at least one Chinese distributor, namely Pacific Digital Plaza.
As we reported a short while ago, the TH67XE makes part of the Biostar “Extreme Edition” series, this line being developed for the most demanding users out there.
As a result Biostar has added a THX TruStudio Pro certified audio codec to the TH67XE, this board also coming with an USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support as well as 100% XDC all solid capacitors.
Furthermore, the TH67XE motherboard features on-board Power and Reset buttons, making it well suited for open-platform benching.
Coming in a mini-ATX format, the board features an 6+1 phase power delivery circuit and what appears to be ample room around the CPU socket, although, judging by the pictures, there's a strong chance that changing the memory also requires removing the graphics card.
As far as expansion slots go, the TH67XE comes with two PCI-E x16, PCI-E x1 and legacy PCI slot, CrossFireX support being highly likely, although Biostar doesn't mention this anywhere on the retail packaging.
As is the case with most other H67 motherboards this also features the graphics path interface required for using Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics core, Biostar pairing the usual DVI out port with HDMI and DisplayPort graphics connectors.
All in all, I must say this looks like one of the nicest mini-ATX motherboards that I happened to see, that black and red theme fitting really good with the board's overall appearance.