Gadgetory

so today we're gonna be having look at a board from biostar okay so Biostar boards are they're never the the most premium motherboard on the market but what they do represent is an incredibly good value as stable overall board and really an incredibly good value because you get features on a Biostar board within the same price point that you just wouldn't see from pretty much any other brand so this particular board is the p55 board it's their t5 x ii motherboard it does support crossfire just like most pieces that most of the other boards in this price point only have one PCIe slot so they obviously can't support crossfire so let's have a quick look here at what the overall features are the biotechs so it's got green power efficiency 100% extreme durable capacitors a unique PWM design so it's called tweak tech-easy BIOS update by USB flashdisk that's a huge one this is so convenient it makes a huge difference overclocking navigator engine rapid switch to shutdown and restart the system you just have so I'm guessing that's on board switches I guess we'll we'll find out you know what why don't we just open this thing up you only wait no this is pretty good okay BIOS real life resume crushed BIOS by USB flashdisk that is terrific okay so let's get this opened up it supports core i7 as well as Core i5 and core i3 processors like all p55 board so let's see what we've got for accessories first of all they've included two SATA cables one molex to SATA power adapter and then one IDE cable and they've included it with this nifty little blue velcro biostar cable time that's kind of nice so now you can go ahead and take that off your cables and then use that to help manage the cables inside your case that's terrific okay that's well thought out okay then we've got an i/o sheet io plate so you can see that you've actually got to pop these out yourself which is I haven't seen that one in a little while okay so then you've got a user's manual which is wow that's some pretty good languages we got there camera ads iPhones going off I think he's gonna try an escape find out what it is wow this has like Arabic languages no I even got it right this is Arabic they have like everything in here polish that's awesome Portuguese Spanish French German oh and then like it's like 90% English okay that works for me let's have a look at the board itself so let's get this out here one little piece of tape holding it on all right so the actual board itself you can see that even though the Box might not be the nicest they haven't skimped on the overall quality and look at the board so you've got large heat sinks and the places where they belong so on the voltage regulators which looks like a four phase setup okay and then they've also got a nice decent looking heatsink on the chipset itself I mean this is if the p55 chipset it doesn't use up a whole lot of power so you don't need to worry too much about that so let's start with the CPU socket like all p55 boards it's I got an LT a 1156 socket so that has support for core i7 core i5 and core i3 but you should note that for Core i5 and core i3 processors you won't have support for their onboard graphics with a p55 board now like all p55 boards we've got support for dual channel ddr3 for slots and then you've got your power connectors in there ideal locations with the 24 pin on the right-hand edge and the 4 pin up at the top left now this is something that I'm really happy to see on a value board because that's a lot of the time the little inconveniences that you start to run into on value boards is they won't have the power connectors in the right places or they they won't have things well thought out in terms of the ports now let's keep moving down the board here so we've got one IDE port here and then we've got a legacy floppy port way down here alright so in terms of SATA 2 we have 6 SATA 2 and these are running off of the chipset now actually there you go I've just said sometimes the port layouts are not ideal on a value board and that's what we're seeing here because if you actually install 2 dual slot graphics cards in this motherboard you will block the top 3 SATA ports unless you're using right angle connectors on them so then you've got your color-coded front panel connectors a power switch and a reset onboard switch I really like see that again on a value board like this - front USB headers and then expansion slots why don't I just hold the camera so the cameraman can go in its first phone just get better okay he just turned it off okay so then we've got a PCI Express 16 X 2 PCI Express 1 X another PCI Express 16 X like all p55 board sees will run at 8 X 8 X and crossfire then we have 2 PCI slots and let's just move around to the back and see what we've got for i/o so it includes 2 ps2 ports one for the mouse and one for the keyboard 6 USB 2.0 ports 1 Gigabit LAN and 7.1 audio so no frills no gimmicks just a unit like many bio start will actually have to say almost all bio start e-series boards in the past have been great performers for the dollar they don't have the gimmicky features but what they do have is good value the features you really need to get the performance out of your system and I just thought now we take a quick look at this thing and on the back there's back pleat thanks for checking it out