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Biostar releases budget AM3+ board for enthusiasts

by on10 March 2015


TA970 for overclockers

Biostar has just released a new budget board for overclockers. 

Dubbed the TA970 Plus the motherboard will hit the shops for $79 and offers features such as ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) to help achieve better results from overclocking.

The whole thing is designed around an audio and Hi-Fi theme even though audio chipset seems to be one of the board's weaker features. It has a cheaper ALC892 that has become a baseline for quality motherboard audio although Biostar used Hi-Fi capacitors and a segmented section of the motherboard to improve the SNR.

There are two USB 3.0 and six USB 2.0 ports on the back I/O panel, with an additional USB 3.0 header and two USB 2.0 headers on the board. Further, the I/O panel has a 1 Gbps LAN connection, two legacy PS/2 connections and basic audio connections.

For storage, the board has five SATA 3 connectors and an mSATA connector. There are two PCI-E x16 2.0, two PCI-E x1 2.0, and two PCI slots available for expansion cards, and the TA970 Plus supports two-way Crossfire.

The board has an 8-phase power design designed for octo-core processors. With an 8-phase power design, this board should manage processors up to 140 W TDP, giving some overclocking headroom for 95 W TDP and 125 W TDP CPUs.

That said the AMD 9000 series processors should not be run on this board as it might need a little too much power,

Last modified on 10 March 2015
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