Biostar TA785GE 128M

Like the ECS A785GM the Biostar TA785GE 128M is a micro-ATX board that targets cost conscious buyers.

The Biostar uses the AMD 785G chipset, like the ECS board, but makes use of DDR2 memory, rather than DDR3. Expansion-wise we found the Biostar more flexible than the ECS board because the former offers two conventional PCI slots and ditches the rarely used PCI-E x1 slots. That said the Biostar lacks HDMI and e-SATA ports both of which are offered by the A785GM.

The TA785GE 128M produced impressive numbers when we fed it our benchmarks. It was faster than ECS' board on the whole and actually kept up with the more expensive Asus and Gigabyte offerings. Despite its micro-ATX formfactor and positioning we found the TA785GE 128M pleasantly surprising in terms of overclocking. You can modify frequencies and voltages manually or, if you're new to overclocking, use the BIOS' built-in ‘Automatic Overclock' system. Going the manual route there are extensive options in terms of range; you can force-feed your CPU and memory 1.45volts over their default settings.

Looking over the Biostar's PCB we noticed one major niggle. Two of the board's Serial ATA ports sit in line with the first PCI slot, so when you use a high-end dual-slot graphics card, such as our XFX Radeon HD 5870, the card covers the first two Serial ATA ports, making them unusable.