will anyone ever have the ballz to get rid of these legacy connections? they should just have a pci-e 1x optional card with serial, ps2, ide connectors if need be. I still believe that these hinder performance.

I like this new mobo review format. Still plenty of details, much less of the "Yeah, I figured as much" benchmarks.

Also it's great to see overclocking take the first benchmarking page. =)

What's with the enclosed heatsink on the southbridge of the Deluxe? If that dinky little pipe is good enough to cool it, why not just put a normal heatsink on the thing instead of making it cost more and routing a heatpipe to it, and then ensuring the heatsink won't be enough alone by limiting surface area?

Neither of those boards seems like a good deal to me. The low-end is too low-end for the price in terms of features, although I realize I'm stuck in the past when a high-performing board with lots of features didn't have to cost more than a car payment (for which I blame Intel, for having dropped integrated support for IDE as well as Ethernet, so requiring add-in chips on all boards).

The high-end board is just plain overpriced, and there's no mid-range. If I were going to pay over 150 dollars for a board, I'd want Firewire, maybe SLI, and they damn well better give me the same x4 PCIe slot that the "budget" model gets as well as more x1 slots (limited by the chipset's support I assume, but an x4 slot seems more high-end to me than a bunch of x1). Two Ethernet ports is less important to me than price, particularly when an add-in PCIe card, if I DID need another port, would be connected in exactly the same way as the onboard.

I might pay 120 bucks for the Deluxe. Before rebates. If it didn't require DDR3. Since it does, I just wouldn't buy it.

Nice concise review. Did this review take less time to produce that before?

Conclusion was dead on IMO. The Deluxe mobo needs Firewire, some eSATA love, and some better overclocking. Perhaps a BIOS update will fix the overclocking?

Too bad about the Ethernet CPU utilization on the cheaper board. If it weren't for that it'd be a good board.

Dugg.

Awesome review and all the comments on the article have been intriguing as well.

Good idea to review both the budget and deluxe boards concurrently. Biostar is really disappointing.

Why do the Asus P35 boards use so much more power than the competition, even when using DDR2? They use about 30 watts more at both idle and load. Any idea what's pulling all the extra juice?

The cheap board looks pretty good; this was a good review, given the product type.

I had a Biostar 6800XT video card. Two months later, the computer wouldn't boot at all. I figured it was a new PSU, so I bought an expensive one from Tagan. Turns out that once I put in my old Ti4200 again, the computer booted. The Biostar card was a dud.

Never buying Biostar again. My mother said she never distributes Biostar parts either, although she said that after I bought the power supply.

Thanks for the review, Geoff. These boards do seem to disappoint for the money, but this Biostar review was perfectly timed for me, as I built 3 Biostar powered systems, for myself and the wife over the last 6 weeks. My brother built one as well.

So far, they have all been fantastic and great values.

Why?

Because they are all Matx AM2 boards, and Newegg had them on a special combo, with a retail 4000+ for like $138 shipped.

The boards have the Nv7050 chipset, HDMI w/HDCP, VGA, S-Video and included a HDMI to DVI adapter. They all have onboard power & reset switches, and all have a lot of OC features, including CPU, RAM, and Chipset voltage options. I changed the overclocking from normal to max (which is V-6 to V-12 in the bios), and all the systems are running at like 2.6Ghz + with ease, and I can even play some CS:S with the onboard video. With the right ram, and lots of tweaking, they can fly.

Check out this Overclock:

http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/981/tf7050355nt0.png

http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f10/oc-king-multi-media-integrat...

Biostar seems to be getting better and better, and Goeff is right, in that they seem to be following in DFI’s footsteps.

The 650i's are in the same price range. I wonder if they'd be a better buy...

The ICH9 does support AHCI/NCQ. See the datasheet --

http://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/datashts/31697201.pdf

AHCI

The ICH9 provides hardware support for Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), a new programming interface for SATA host controllers. Platforms supporting AHCI may take advantage of performance features such as no master/slave designation for SATA devices—each device is treated as a master—and hardware-assisted native command queuing. AHCI also provides usability enhancements such as Hot-Plug. AHCI requires appropriate software support (e.g., an AHCI driver) and for some features, hardware support in the SATA device or additional platform hardware. See Section1.3 for details on component feature availability.

In Section 1.3 there's a table where it is indicated that ICH9 does not support AHCI, but with "(Note 4)", which happens to be "ICH9 Base provides hardware support for AHCI functionality when enabled by appropriate system configuration and software driver."

Intel's Matrix Storage Manager doesn't install on Windows on plain ICH9 systems; however, if you add the PCI vendor/product IDs to the .inf as described here, you will get AHCI/NCQ support on Windows (but of course, no firmware RAID support):

http://kerneltrap.org/node/7582#comment-223184

I personally have an Intel DG33FB motherboard with a G33/ICH9 chipset. I run Linux on it, and it does use AHCI and enable NCQ on my WD5000AAKS hard disk (out of the box, even; no tweaking needed):

Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 2.2
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0200 32 slots 6 ports 3 Gbps 0x3f impl SATA mode
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq led clo pmp pio slum part
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi0 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi1 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi2 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi3 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi4 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi5 : ahci
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858100 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858180 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858200 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858280 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata5: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858300 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata6: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xf8858380 ctl 0x00000000 bmdma 0x00000000 irq 217
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata1: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata1.00: ATA-7: WDC WD5000AAKS-22TMA0, 12.01C01, max UDMA/133
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata1.00: 976773168 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Aug 21 16:41:47 athena kernel: scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD5000AAKS-2 12.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

Huh that's quite a long list of benchmarks there. I thought TR was going to trim the benchmarks? Wasn't there a big deal made over how Mobo reviews take too much time? Seems like the only fruitful ones were the network performance.

Hehehe. Deluxe Biostar. Oxymoron anyone?

I'm somewhat surprised that the budget Biostar costs more than the Gigabyte RAID-less P35 budget board (which has all-solid caps).

good review, dugg.

W00t. Now that's a board I might actually buy. Any ideas on why the overclocking wasn't more successful? What were the temperatures like on the northbridge?