Biostar Hi-Fi A85W Motherboard Review

Today we are going to take a look at the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W motherboard which features the same A85X chipset as the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H that we reviewed recently. Consequently, it features AMD's FM2 socket which supports the latest 'Trinity' APUs. Biostar may not be top of most enthusiasts lists but we have been very impressed with some of their previous products such as the TZ77XE4 that we looked at a few months back. It offered exemplary overclocking performance which rivaled some of the best Asus, Gigabyte and ASRock motherboards on the market. The 'Hi-Fi' portion of this motherboard's name highlights Biostar's dedication to quality audio with this motherboard. We look forward to seeing whether this makes the A85W an ideal candidate for those looking to build a large home theatre PC or a multimedia PC. Features Supported Socket FM2 processors AMD A-series/ E2-series processor Supported AMD Mutil Core(x4,x2) AMD 100W processor support AMD A85X Chipset 4 DIMM supported DDR3-2400(OC)/ 2133(OC)/ 1866/ 1600/ 1333/ 1066/ 800 Supported SATA 6Gb/s 2X speed than current SATA 3G Supported USB 3.0 AMD Dual Graphics Technology 100% X.D.C solid capacitor BIOSTAR Puro Hi-Fi The A85W is supplied in a standard motherboard box which is decorated in an attractive white and grey livery. The front of the box features a large image of a speaker alongside some sound waves, illustrating the audio-orientated nature of this motherboard. Turning the box over reveals a myriad of logos which illustrate various features of the motherboard. The box itself feels very good quality and should do a good job of protecting the motherboard in transit. Inside the box, there is a fairly limited bundle included. This comprises of a user guide, a software CD, a selection of SATA cables and an I/O faceplate. Unlike some other manufacturers, Biostar haven't nailed down a specific colour scheme for all of their motherboards. The 'Hi-Fi' range all feature a blue and black colour scheme which is very attractive indeed. This is an ATX model, featuring a black PCB with mainly black fittings and highlights of metallic blue here and there. All of the power regulation circuitry is located to the left of the CPU socket. This is covered with a fairly substantial heatsink, suggesting that this motherboard has been designed with overclocking in mind. This particular motherboard only features a 4-pin CPU power connector while others including the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H feature an 8-pin. Moving over to the right of the CPU socket, there are four DDR3 RAM slots which can handle dual channel memory with frequencies of 2400 MHz (OC), 2133 MHz (OC), 1866 MHz, 1600 MHz, 1333 MHz, 1066 MHz and 800 MHz. The 24-pin motherboard power connector is located to the right-hand side of the memory slots, along the edge of the motherboard. Moving further down the right hand side, we find eight SATA-600 ports which have thoughtfully been angled at 90 degrees to facilitate cable management. The chipset is located just behind these, covered with a small heatsink. We most of the internal headers along the bottom edge of the motherboard. From left to right we find the Audio header, an S-PDIF header, a CIR header, a COM header, a 3-pin fan header and a pair of USB2.0 headers. To the right of these there are power and reset buttons, the front panel header and a Debug LED readout. For some reason, Biostar has chosen to locate the internal USB3.0 header right in the middle of the motherboard, amongst the PCI Express slots. This is a fairly illogical place for a USB3.0 header as it will no doubt cause cable routing issues for some users. Biostar has included a fairly plentiful array of expansion slots. From top to bottom we find a PCI Express x1 slot, a PCI Express x16 slot, another PCI Express x1 slot, a further PCI Express x16 slot (limited to x4 with dual cards), and two legacy PCI slots. Looking at the rear I/O panel, there are no significant omissions. From left to right we find a PS/2 connector, two USB2.0 ports, HDMI, VGA and DVI connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two further USB2.0 connectors, two USB3.0 connectors and six 3.5mm audio jacks. BIOS The first page of the BIOS gives us a brief overview of the system details and BIOS information. Under the 'Advanced' tab, we have access to most of the non-overclocking related settings for the system. The next two tabs contain the chipset settings and boot configuration. The fifth tab lets us set BIOS and administrator passwords for the system. Under the sixth tab labelled 'O.N.E.', we find all of the overclocking settings. The final tab lets us configure various settings profiles. Overclocking We managed to achieve a modest 4.3 GHz overclock with the AMD Vision A8-5600K (3.6ghz default speed). This was achieved using a baseclock of 100 MHz with a multiplier of 43x. We used a fixed voltage of 1.45V to achieve this. See validation here. In this review we are going to benchmark the AMD Vision A8-5600 at reference clock speeds (3.6ghz) and when overclocked to 4.3ghz, as detailed on the previous page. Test System: Processor: AMD Vision A8-5600 Motherboard: Biostar Hi-Fi A85W Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE Thermal Paste: Arctic Cooling MX-2 Memory: 16 GB Mushkin Blackline 1600 MHz Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 7950 Power Supply: Silverstone Platinum 1000W System Drive: Kingston HyperX 3K 240 GB Monitor: Viewsonic VX2260WM Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) Software: PCMark 7 3DMark 3DMark 11 3DMark Vantage SiSoft Sandra 2013 Cinebench R11.5 CrystalDiskMark Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.7 VLC Media Player Performance Monitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Super Pi 1.5 Mod CPUID Hardware Monitor CPU-Z DiRT Showdown Battlefield 3 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use. We see a decent boost in system wide performance from overclocking. 3DMark is Futuremark’s latest benchmark. It can be used to benchmark and compare everything from mobile devices, such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, to high-end gaming systems. The benchmark is available for Windows, Windows RT Android and iOS. With 3 separate tests, each of which is intended to be used alongside a specific classification of hardware, 3DMark is a very versatile benchmark. Ice Storm is intended to be used with mobile devices, Cloud Gate is good for use with laptops and home PCs, and Fire Strike can be used to push the performance of gaming PCs. We used the ‘Fire Strike’ benchmark which is designed to be used on gaming PCs. We opted for theNormal setting, NOT the Extreme mode. In this test we can see how overclocking benefits gaming performance. 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page. Here we see a very similar improvement in performance to the previous 3Dmark test. Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings. As we would expect, overclocking significantly boosts the CPU score of the system. Again we see a decent improvement in performance when overclocked. Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand. Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable: Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render. Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux. Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems. Multicore CPU support. Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles). Powerful C++ API. Comprehensive performance profiling system. Flexible XML-based data structures. In this test we see a very small boost in performance when the system is overclocked. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. Native ports for all major operating systems are available: Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86) Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64) Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64) Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01) Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02) All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of: SMP – Multi-Processor MC – Multi-Core SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86 IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit In this test we see strong processing performance from the A8-5600K APU, both in stock and overclocked tests. Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores. In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor. Cinebench shows us how the test system can benefit from utilising multi-threaded applications, both at stock speeds and when overclocked. Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU. In this test, our system showed fairly poor performance. AMD processors never perform as well in this test, though, and we did see an improvement when the system was overclocked. A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use one of our favourite benchmark utilities - CrystalDiskMark X64 Edition - to rate performance from the on-board SATA controller. Here we can see that our SSD manages to reach its full potential through the SATA-600 interface. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Again we see impressive SATA performance from the system. SATA-600 is enabled across all eight of the ports on the motheboard. WinRAR is one of the most popular archive manager programs available. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. You can try WinRAR before buy, its trial version is available in downloads. We measured the time taken to archive two 2.75 GB .MKV files. In this test we can see a decent boost in real world performance when the system is overclocked. The Matroska Media container is a very popular, open standard Multimedia container which is usually found as .MKV files. It is a very popular format in enthusiast circles and can be played directly in VLC or Windows Media Player with suitable codecs installed. We played our 1080P MKV movie using the latest version of VLC Media Player and measured the CPU usage with the Performance Monitor built into Windows. Again, we see a significant boost in real world performance with the system overclocked. CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats. Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology. New and Improved Features Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously. Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention. Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices. Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment. Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A. Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier. For our testing today we are converting a 1.43 GB 720p MKV file to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. Hardware acceleration was enabled to give you a good idea of system wide real world performance. In this test, the performance was identical at stock speeds and when overclocked, because this application relies heavily on hardware acceleration. According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. In Battlefield 3, the performance benefits from overclocking were minimal. Black Ops 2 is the latest episode in the Call of Duty franchise and is one of the most popular games of the moment. It uses an updated version of the IW engine, used in previous Call of Duty games, which isn't particularly demanding. This makes it ideal for testing mid-range gaming systems like this. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. In Black Ops 2, the performance boost from overclocking was a little more noticeable, but still pretty small. Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007. We used the settings illustrated in the screenshot above for testing. We can see that there are much more significant improvements in performance when overclocked in DiRT 3 than in the other two games we tested. We measured the power consumption of our entire test system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We recorded results with the system at reference clock speeds and when overclocked to 4.3 GHz. Here we can see fairly impressive power consumption for the system, even though it features a high-end graphics card. We are quite impressed with the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W overall. It offers an impressive feature set in a very attractive package which is sure to let you create an attractive-looking system. We were a little disappointed that we couldn't squeeze a fully stable 4.4 GHz out of our AMD Vision A8-5600K APU with this motherboard but 4.3 GHz is still fairly respectable. In our tests, performance was very similar to the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H that we reviewed recently. One of our minor gripes with this motherboard is the placement of the internal USB3.0 header. It has been squeezed in between two of the Expansion slots, creating possible conflict issues. It will also make cable routing difficult. We think that the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W offers fairly good value for money. It can be purchased from Ebuyer for around £65, making it an ideal choice for a low cost ATX solution. Those who don't mind sacrificing the attractive colour scheme and the ATX form factor should consider the Gigabyte F2A85XM-D3H instead as it's £10 cheaper. Pros: Good value for money. Well featured. Better onboard audio than most motherboards. Attractive design. Cons: Dated UEFI design. Illogical USB3.0 header placement. KitGuru says: Biostar is showing that it can compete with the big three motherboard manufacturers with this quality addition to their range.

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Biostar Hi-Fi A85W Motherboard Review

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