BIOSTAR TA990FXE AMD 990FX Motherboard Review

BIOSTAR TA990FXE Motherboard Layout

Overall I dig the look of the BIOSTAR TA990FXE. The blacked out look that has become popular looks nice, but is a bit overdone for my taste. The red and white expansion slots and DIMM slots look good against the black PCB. Overall the TA990FXE has a great contrasting look. Granted, performance will always trump looks in my book, we’ll get to the performance of the TA990FXE shortly, though.

Starting out the tour of the BIOSTAR TA990FXE AMD 990FX motherboard, we see the typical features surrounding the AMD AM3+ socket. The BIOSTAR TA990FXE features four DIMM slots that will support DDR3 memory up to 2000MHz (O.C.) and a maximum of 32GB of memory. To the right of the AM3+ socket is a single four pin CPU fan header, and below the DIMM slots is the 24pin motherboard power.

The BIOSTAR TA990FXE features five SATA III 6Gbps ports; four come out parallel to the PCB while the fifth SATA III port comes out perpendicular to the TA990FXE motherboard. The SATA III port that comes out perpendicular will be blocked if you run multiple GPU’s in either SLI or CrossFireX. To the left of the SATA ports is a debug LED that will display your POST codes. Running our eyes along the edge of the BIOSTAR TA990FXE, we have the pinout for the front panel, onboard power and reset buttons, clear CMOS jumper, two USB 2.0 headers, Internal SuperSpeed USB 3.0 header, front panel IEEE1394A header, and a 3pin system fan header.

Swinging the BIOSTAR TA990FXE around we can get a good look at the expansion slots. The TA990FXE is equipped with three PCIe X16 slots that will run in a x16,x16,x4 combination. The layout of the PCIe x16 slots could have been better; I would have liked to have seen each of the PCIe x16 slots be able to fit a dual slot graphics card. In addition to the three PCIe x16 slots, the BIOSTAR TA990FXE features a single PCIe x1 slot and a pair of PCI slots. To the immediate left of the first PCIe x16 slot is a 3pin system fan header and a four pin Molex power plug to deliver additional power to the expansion slots. Picking up where we left off up along the edge of the BIOSTAR TA990FXE, we have an internal header for a serial port, CIR (Consumer Infrared), SPDIF out, and the header for the front panel audio. Taking a quick look at the integrated chips in front of the expansion slots we can see the Realtek ALC892 8-channel HD audio and the Atheros AR8151 Gigabit Ethernet controller.

It’s been awhile since we’ve come across a motherboard that still features a PS/2 port for both a keyboard and a mouse. In addition to the pair of PS/2 ports the BIOSTAR TA990FXE features SPDIF out in both the optical and Coaxial flavors, four USB 2.0 ports, two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports, Firewire, eSATA 3Gbps, six audio jacks, and a single RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet port.