Biostar TA690G - Testing continued
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Counter Strike: Source
This was a mini upgrade to one of the best selling games ever made. This should give us a good indication of mild gaming performance. It would be worthless to try to run Crysis or other games that stress the GPU; this motherboard clearly wouldn't be able to handle it at the lowest settings.
All the benchmarks show similar results. The overclocked setting shows a slight gain. This isn't anything out of the blue here. I wasn't going to overclock very far without instability and crashes. The built-in graphics processing unit is decent, but not great. You can get away with playing older games fine at medium settings and a lower resolution, but jacking up the resolution or detail will cause the games to slow to a crawl.
In WinRar, we saw a huge increase from the extra bandwidth around all the parts of the motherboard. I was really surprised by these results with such a small increase in speed. It shows that the hyperlink speed in this case is killing bandwidth.
Conclusion
Considering my last review of a Biostar motherboard came to a horrifying end, I am pleasantly surprised with this motherboard. As far as the layout goes, this is a nicely designed board. It has many features that you would find on an ATX motherboard. Putting the motherboard in a case and connecting everything is a breeze; no area seems to be cramped or to have too many connectors going into it.
The pros of this motherboard are in the chipsets. I wasn't expecting much, since this is one of AMD's first chipsets. I was really surprised when I got into the detail of the chipset. The built-in HDMI was a great perk. The chip is small and doesn't create lots of heat, which is a definite perk. When going into the BIOS, you quickly forget this is a mATX motherboard made for the size and not features. It has all the abilities of an overclocker-friendly board.
The Biostar TA690G leaves this review with great remarks from me. I am very impressed with this little motherboard. If you're in the market for a mATX AMD motherboard, I would recommend this one. If you are in the market for an ATX motherboard, while this is cheap, it doesn't offer anything a majority of ATX motherboards don't already offer.
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