Biostar's 7-Series Ivy Bridge-Ready Motherboards

Biostar has done what its various rivals did, or will do soon enough, namely launch a whole bunch of new motherboards in preparation for the event that will supposedly take place on April 23. 

Biostar made a point of saying that this is the “for the first time” product lineup and, sure enough, used those words no less than twelve times in its press release. 

Mildly irritating repetitions aside, the new motherboard line doesn't leave much to be desired, if anything. 

That means that the prices will determine how well they sell compared to the platforms released by Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock and everyone else. 

We aren't going to talk about all of the motherboards here, since people can just drop by their product pages by checking out this link. 

Nevertheless, we'll look a bit at the TZ77XE4, the so-called flagship of Biostar's collection. 

One thing to notice is the presence of four memory slots (maximum capacity is 32 GB) and that of two PCI Express 3.0 slots (x16), one PCI Express 2.0 slot (x16), a PCI Express 2.0 with a lower setting (x1) and a pair of legacy PCI slots. 

CrossFireX (AMD) and SLI (NVIDIA) multi-GPU configurations should be easy to set up, which is good because, even though Intel's new CPUs may have GPUs with DirectX 11 now, they are still very weak compared to add-in boards. 

Besides the above, the TZ77XE4 offers four SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors (SATA III) and the same number of SATA 3.0 Gbps ports (SATA II). 

Of course, Intel Smart Response Technology is supported (SSD caching, as it was initially known), as are the SATA RAID: 0, 1, 5 and 10 modes. 

Moving on, the rear I/O panel includes a PS/2 keyboard plug, eSATA (one port), two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0, HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA and 5.1-channel audio. Finally, internal headers can allow for some extra USB 3.0 / 2.0 ports.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview