A closer Look Part Two
The heart of the Biostar Mini ITX board sports a on board processor that rates at a respectable ( for a home theatre pc board) 1.8GHZ and is dual core also. In addition this processor is of the IvyBridge generation so as to enable the use of an onboard video card. The processor itself is cooled by a heatsink and 40mm fan. Now this could be noisy on a poorly ventilated case, however if the reverse were true then active cooling in this area will not be needed unless the CPU were to be ‘overclocked’.
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The only thing we could find that Biostar could improve upon would be the fan header for the CPU. We feel that this the design would be better served if the aforementioned point were closer to the processor, thus negating the need for a long power lead.
As always on every motherboard review we always take the Heatsinks off in order to check the spread of the thermal compound. This is so there is proper coverage for maximum heat transference.
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Biostar have opted to go with a thermal pad, rather than a paste solution as they feel a paste under these conditions would not be needed as the processor is low specification and ergo less heat.
The images below show the I/O section and going from left to right we have the PS2 Headers then we have the HDMI slot, DSUB connector, 4x USB 2.0 sockets, Gigabit Network card and finally the Realtek on board sound card. The only real fault that we can pick with this section is why include a D-SUB and why not a DVI? Lest we forget there seems to be a lack of USB3.0 support also.
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Lastly the Biostar supports 1X PCIEX16 slot and two ram slots. If we take the odd colour scheme aside and concentrate on the motherboard layout, there are a few things we would have done differently and there are as follows:
- Ram sockets on the bottom of the motherboard
- repositioned the 24pin atx
- move the 4 pin CPU EPS to the right at the edge of the board so cables do not cross the RAM slots.
Right that is about it, so now lets have a look at the testing phase.
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