Biostar TA890GXB HD Micro-ATX Motherboard Review

Biostar TA890GXB HD; A Closer look

The BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD uses an attractive red, black and white color scheme that will look good in just about any color case. One issue I noticed right off of the line is the power circuitry for the CPU. The reason this stands out and is worth mentioning is that there is no cooling on it. Most likely this won’t cause any issues if you plan on running your system at the out of the box clock speeds. If you plan on doing any overclocking you can always do something like what was done here.

Above we get a look at the four memory slots. The memory slots support DDR3 up to 1600MHz (OC). Beneath the memory is the 24 pin plug for the power supply.

Next to the memory slots we have the SB850 chipset heatsink. There are also six SATA 6GB/s ports, which will support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. Immediately next to the 24 pin power plug is a reset switch and a power switch which come in handy for testing purposes. Directly above the pair of switches is the CMOS reset jumper.

Directly to the right of the six SATA3 ports is the pin out for the front panel, a system fan header, and three USB2.0 headers. Moving past the three USB headers we have the power jumper for the USB2.0 headers.

Next to the USB2.0 power jumper is the pin out for the serial port, printer port, consumer infrared port, SPDIF out, and the front panel audio header. Above those is the pair of PCI expansion slots and the single PCI-e x16 2.0 expansion slot.

In the above photo we can see the 4 pin cpu power, the power circuitry for the cpu, and another jumper for the USB2.0 power.

The ports on the I/O panel were a little bit light but include the basics. There is a single PS/2 port for a keyboard, four USB2.0 ports, an HDMI connector, DVI and VGA ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, and three audio connectors.

The AM3 socket will support all of the latest processors from AMD including the newest AMD Phenom II X6 1090T. The BIOSTAR TA890GXB HD has a maximum cpu TDP (thermal design power) of 125Watts.