Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus thought net and today we're talking about bio stars h17 tz3 motherboard the hi-fi series boards and this board as the name indicates uses the h 170 chipset so it's not the same as the z170 chipsets we've looked at but many of you probably already know the differences from our previous video on chipset differences I'll post the table here if you need a reminder of what those are so the H 170 board is more mainstream targeted it is not the performance market that z170 targets and to that end there's no overclocking on H 170 but that's fine if you're not an overclocker if you're just trying to find a mainstream or business board this would be something that falls within your search filtering the bio star hi-fi H 173 board uses a very unique feature it's got two types of memory supported on board because these skylake CPU actually supports both ddr3l and ddr4 for memory types it's pretty important to note here that ddr3l is not the same as ddr3 it's low voltage as indicated by the L and you could technically try and make ddr3 work in a ddr3l slot like on this motherboard but there's no guarantee it'll work it's probably gonna be unstable if the voltage isn't natively low and you're better off using either ddr3l or ddr4 and nothing else this feature means that the motherboard is targeting a pretty specific niche it's primarily aimed at users who want to move to skylake but already have ddr3l memory and don't want to buy ddr4 so that's very specific especially because ddr4 Ram is priced at about 50 bucks right now for two sticks of 4 gigabytes or 8 gigabytes in terms of the specs supported by the bio star board you can use up to 16 gigabytes of ddr3 L at 1600 megahertz or you can use up to 32 gigabytes of ddr4 at 21 33 megahertz so no high-speed memory here and that is a limitation of the chipset more than anything other than this the memory of course is a big thing the chipsets another big thing though with H 170 you get 22 HS io lands so with z170 you get 26 HS IO lanes this means that there are fewer high speed io lanes available through the chipset to the motherboard and that means fewer high speed i/o devices can be supported for a quick reminder H s i/o devices include Gigabit Ethernet they include PCIe devices video or otherwise and they include SATA SATA Express and things of that nature m dot two certainly is included as well so for the features on this motherboard there are two SATA Express ports which can double as SATA three ports so you can use them as SATA 3 if you don't have Express devices there are 4 SATA 3 ports one m dot 2 gum stick port which consumes four of the PCIe lanes on the H 170 a chip set so for the features on this board the i/o includes a Gigabit Ethernet port with surge protection actually a nice feature on bio stars part and that basically helps if you have unstable power it'll assist in managing the data transfer during those up and down times so for the devices on the board in terms of i/o a high-speed i/o and all of that there is one PCI Express by 16 port that is wired for by 16 so that's your video card slot obviously and then there's a PCIe by one slot which is usable for expansion cards video capture things like that that are lower lane requirement devices and then for SSDs storage hard drives there's an MDOT 2x4 LAN consuming gum stick port so it is a gum stick SSD slot that uses four HS i/o lanes from the chipset for PCIe transfer of SSD data and then you've got two SATA Express ports which can double si a three and four SATA 3 ports which are the usual SATA device ports at six a Giga bits per second front panel setup has two USB 2.0 options one USB 3.0 to the front of the case and the FPC the front panel control plug in area has an annoying wall around it with no labeling whatsoever for the pin out so I would really appreciate it if there were labeling on there instead and if that wall were removed but that's just sort of a weird older school design that biased opted for on the FPC and speaking to older school designs there's oddly still calm and parallel ports which are not really useful for US markets but are potentially useful for global or Asian markets things like that moving into UEFI and the interface we're gonna show a bunch of screenshots of UEFI now Biostar uses a dip chip for its bios rather than an SMD and the XIII's firmware visualizes Hardware monitoring on the left side somewhat normal here and that includes CPU fan rpm CPU temperatures and mem and CPU specs which include frequency and voltages for each of those devices UEFI options are also fairly bare-bones compared to a z170 chipset somewhat expected though and that's particularly noticeable when it comes to the lock to overclocking functionality biostar has a one menu oh and E as they call it and that allows CPU multiplier up ticking - the turbo clock so that users can force an always active turbo boost setting but no further overclocking is permitted so if yours turbos your CB turbos to 3.9 gigahertz it will allow a multiplier of 39 even though the reference base multiplier might be something like 32 or 34 again this is a limitation of the chipset over volting is available should the force turbo require a voltage increase and this is extended to DRAM over voltage as well for offsetting unstable but the limited frequencies that are permissible through the board CPU see states can be disabled or enabled coinciding with standards and the power limiters can be lightly tuned through the OE menu this is about the extent of the overclocking tab though and we can look to Hardware monitoring for something a little bit more interesting on the Hardware monitoring tab CPU fan speeds can be set to smart which is dependent upon load and PWM controlled and the system fans are configurable to custom fan curves mapped versus temperature so that's always a welcomed feature as well speaking briefly to the power and fan headers on the board we were actually very fond of bio stars decision to use all four pen fan headers so you can use all PWM fans with no three pin headers present UEFI on the h1 70s tria has a big focus on security features which we can we've been showing and will continue to show in these screenshots and those security features include things like secure boot platform key management authorized signatures and time stamps and things of that nature which are potentially useful in small business applications but pretty useless for the average enthusiast gamer or mainstream system user from other boards we currently only do two objective tests and those are boot times to get into Windows 10 and then a power consumption test measuring the total system wattage so the chart we're going to show you for power consumption shows full load on the system using fire strike extreme which is a 3d mark tool and that's run on the combined test so the CPU and the GPU are both stressed we use an identical bench for all tests on all motherboards other than the board itself of course and you can check the specs on that bench in the link in the description below at the article jumping right into it it's no surprise that the stripped-down Mini ITX board from EVGA runs at a lower power consumption than the other on bench boards that's largely because it's smaller it's got fewer devices on it a lot less i/o and simpler chip logic overall other than the chipset itself full system load shows the micro ATX h1 70 z3 operating at 300 18.8 4 watt compared against the Mini ITX EVGA board which was operating at 300 4.4 eight watts and the full ATX MSI be 150 a pro we've yet to review operating at 3 25.8 5 watts boot times show by oh stars h1 70 z3 motherboard as the fastest booting board currently on our bench beating out the MSI be 150 a pro by 0.9 3 seconds and the EVGA stainer by about 2.9 3 seconds the h1 70 z3 jumps to the desktop that's Windows 10 so from off to Windows 10 usable and around 19 seconds after pressing the power button without any special features enabled and BIOS to make it boot faster by oh stars h1 70 SZ 3 motherboard has every feature you'd want in a mainstream board it's security features are complete and very usable for small businesses that don't have ultra complex requirements but still want some security and platform key management it's mainstream user issues are what you'd expect you can do one PCIe video card you can do one PCIe X 1 divided by n other ly unused especially because the video card covers one of them so those are just kind of pointless and only there to satisfy a dated standard at this point so the board overall there's not a lot we have to complain about the only thing to complain about is its biggest feature which is ddr3l and ddr4 support this feature alone makes it kind of tough to justify the board because if you look at the market you can get a gigabyte as rock or Asus board in the same price range from ninety dollars to one hundred and five dollars at the high end with this board falling at the hundred five dollar price point so then what's what's making the purchase worth it if you have a need for ddr3 L is strictly the fact that you don't want to spend an extra $50 on ddr4 memory so at that point when you're looking at I really need to save $50 so I'm gonna buy the specific board that limits my upgrade potential by limiting the amount of memory slots you can saturate well that's that's a tricky situation I would probably advise that you just save off a bit longer and buy the memory instead and do a full upgrade if you want to split the upgrade certainly that's your prerogative the board is good otherwise so I have no major complaints about the board in general but from a value standpoint you might get a little bit more mileage out of a board like the Asus or gigabyte options where you have a full four sticks available through four slots that are one type of memory so you can expand to a higher capacity and you might get higher frequencies if you opt for a hundred ish dollar z170 board instead that's all ddr4 so that's the general thought on this board no major complaints other than its main selling point so if you want that selling point it's not a bad board but that's just a small market so you should know who you are if you are one of those people that's all over the time if you like this type of cover hit the patreon link in the post roll video down in this area somewhere in the first role we greatly appreciate your support subscribe as always and I'll see you all next time