CeBIT 2009 3-8 March, Hannover (Germany), day 3

Page 8 - Biostar: Motherboards and video cards

Biostar appeared and became popular in Bulgaria with their cheap and yet very capable (overclock wise) motherboards. Ever since (5 years and counting) the company continues to make budget oriented products, even though they did expand their range of products and now we can see high end motherboards from them, ones using the X58 chipset for example. Quite some questions were on our minds for quite some time and seeing Biostar have a stand at the expo we just couldn't pass the opportunity to get our answers.

Their stand was not the biggest, but was big enough to display the full range of their products while still hosting 6 demo machines using a variety of their motherboards and cards.

Biostar TPOWER X58 is Biostar's top model motherboard an as with any Core i7 motherboards has tons of features. The motherboard uses only solid Japan made capacitors, a large heatpipe cooling for the chipset and support of BIOSTAR G.P.U (Green Power Utility) - Biostar's own power saving technology. Also the company is one of the first that showed a P55 motherboard at the expo. It was of course only a prototype, since Intel announced that P55 motherboards and processors will be released in the third quarter on 2009. The rest of the Biostar product range for Intel includes various models based on every type of chipset available, in other words - there are motherboards for every kind of taste and need.

The range of products for AMD is just as big, but for AMD there are fewer actively selling chipsets, thus the range of Biostar motherboards for AMD at the expo was less spectacular.

Biostar impressed us a lot with their range of miniature motherboards. there were not only mini-ITX ones, but even pico-ITX! Biostar BI94GS PA is Intel based motherboard with Atom N270 CPU, a jewel that in could be the basis of a car pc :)

Biostar began manufacturing video cards very recently. All their models are are budget oriented, with no attempts at making ones with expensive, high performance cores. The top models at the expo were the recently announced AMD HD 4830 and NVIDIA GTS250. The best thing about them was is that Biostar do not use referent coolers, instead they rely on their own heatpipe based ones. And that supposedly will keep them cooler and more quiet while still keeping the price reasonable.