Biostar's Hi-Fi A85W is a low cost way to start building a new AMD system, currently after MIR it is $85 on NewEgg and comes with 8GB of free G.SKILL RAM. You get a board that supports Hybrid CrossFire and sports a pait of PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (only one is full speed), two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and a pair of legacy PCI slots. It has eight SATA 6.0 Gb/s, eight USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports to give you a lot of flexibility for drives and peripherals as well as DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs and a feature dubbed "PURO Hi-Fi"; a sheild for the better than average onboard audio codec. TechPowerUp were impressed with the wide variety of overclocking options in the UEFI BIOS, until they tried overclocking and found a variety of issues with TurboCore and other overclocking settings. Hopefully Biostar wil release a BIOS update to fix what is otherwise a solid choice of FM2 motherboard.
"Biostar is at it again with a mid-range entry level product, the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W. Ready to rock out with AMD's new Piledriver FM2 APUs, the Biostar Hi-Fi A85W comes with an audio-oriented theme that's usually reserved for high-end products. Did it play sweet music, or is it a bit out of tune?"
Here are some more Motherboard articles from around the web:
- ECS A85F2-A Golden FM2 Motherboard Review @ TechwareLabs
- Asus F2A55-M LK @ eTeknix
- MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 Review @ HCW
- Gigabyte GA-F2A75M-D3H Budget FM2 @ SPCR
- BIOS Option Of The Week – DQS Training Control @ X-bit Labs
- ASUS Crosshair V Formula-Z @ Bjorn3D
- ASRock Z77 Extreme11 Motherboard @ Hardware Secrets