14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwanese motherboard company Biostar has just officially launched its first FM2 motherboard that supports AMD’s latest Trinity APUs that will be released in two weeks.
The new Hi-Fi series from Biostar uses a quality sound amplifier that’s THX certified and also comes with a good 110 dB SNR.
The company views its integrated audio implementation as the mainboards’ main feature that will differentiate it from other mobos on the shelf.
Biostar uses quality electronics and a separate power circuit for each audio channel that’s called Hi-Fi AMP and multi channels calibration (MCC).
Other original implementations from the company such as High Quality ESD, Smart Ear, Hi-Fi Resistor, Hi-Fi Cap and others, are also integrated into the new mother board.
The Hi-Fi A85X FM2 AMD motherboard uses only solid capacitors and boost nice overclocking capabilities that will allow the user to drive the memory beyond the DDR3 2400 mark.
It will support any AMD E2, A4, A6, A8 and 10 processor with an FM2 pin-out as well as Athlon II X4 CPUs that are based on the new APUs with a maximum TDP of 100 watts.
We would have liked to see support for 125W TDP as we would have been more at ease when overclocking.
Standard APUs already come with a 100W TDP so there will likely not be much room left for additional overclocking.
The mainboard will support a maximum of 64 GB of DDR3 memory in its four DIMM slots that will be clocked at 1866 MHz or even 2133 MHz or 2400 MHz through overclocking.
There are three PCI-E slots with a x16 physical interface, but the bandwidth offered is x16 for the first one, x8 for the mid one and just x4 for the third PCI-E x16 slot, but all feature AMD CrossFireX support.
We also have a single PCI-E x1 slot along with a legacy PCI 32-Bit slot.
There are 7 SATA 3 internal connectors along with a single eSATA port and the chipset comes with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 support.
On the connectivity side, there are two USB 3.0 ports and an additional USB 3.0 header along with four USB 2.0 ports and no less than four USB 2.0 headers.
Realtek chips take care of the HD audio and the Gigabit LAN.
The company fails to point out that the motherboard also comes with nice PCB buttons to use when overclocking along with a two digit error code display, but both are present on the Hi-Fi A85X.
