CLOSER LOOK
Recalling my BIOSTAR boxes from years gone by, its nice to see the company employing a simpler and more professional approach to their recent packaging. As we can see, the BIOSTAR Hi-Fi Z87X 3D is served in a clean, white box with the Hi-Fi branding up front. Lots of large marketing icons can be found in the front of the box and at the back we get to see some details about the features of the board.
The package consists of the essentials with a I/O shield, some SATA cables, a CrossFire bridge and of course an installtion disc with some documentation. One of the extra here is the included mic which is used for calibration of the Smart Ear 3D for surround setup.
We have to applaud BIOSTAR for using a matte black PCB in this motherboard. We usually see many boards in this price range sport a more brownish PCB but not with BIOSTAR. Moving on, we see the board sports a blue and black motif with metallic blue heatsinks crowning the VRM area. The board feels very premium also but those heatsink just ain’t doing it for me visually though you may disagree.
The board packs a legacy PS/2 port along with 2 pairs of USB2.0 ports and a pair of USB3.0 ports. Integrated video can be displayed via VGA, DVI and HDMI. Going further down we have the LAN port followed by the 8-channel audio powered by an ALC898 rounding off the rear I/O area.
The BIOSTAR Hi-Fi Z87X 3D has a total of six SATAIII ports powered off the Intel chipset. From this angle we can also see the angled USB3.0 front panel header.
The heatsinks from this angle look much better. The heatsink are actually hollow to allow airflow between them. The design suggests they’re more for style than dissipation but they are amply sized so its safe to say they can still take on some load.
A quick glance over the lower edge of the board we see our board is also armed with onboard switches and these’ll come very handy for people who like to fiddle around with their systems. In conjunction with the debug LED display, these little additions are a great touch.
And we finally make our way to the audio area of the motherboard. We can see BIOSTAR’s proprietary implementation to boost the audio experience here is very bold. The Realtek ALC898 chip itself is shielded for better isolation. No isolation from the PCB though unlike those done by other board vendors.
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Biostar may not have the looks of a prom queen but she can definitely be effortlessly fun if given the chance and shines in other ways that you don’t normally consider.