Just a little report on a system I put together this weekend. It was a super-cheap project, and this Biostar motherboard, the A780L3L, was about the cheapest AM3 board available. I paired it with an Athlon II X3 455 (3.3GHz) in the hopes of unlocking an extra core.
I have difficulty understanding Biostar. You know from the start that you're buying cheap, and it shows - no paper "manual" as such, and the PDF on the CD is fairly sketchy too. They do come with a fold-out quick-guide though which actually I really like - tells you everything you need to know when you're building it without wading through explainations of the bios and approved memory configurations.
On the other hand though, once you get going you start thinking it's not so bad after all. The package came with some nice SATA cables, and the board doesn't feel particularly cheap - not like unboxing an ECS board used to.
There are some lovely touches on this board. For instance, in the BIOS there's the most sophisticated fan control I've ever seen - options for voltage control, 3 pin or 4 pin PWM, and even a fan-calibration option. I pressed enter and it starting running my CPU fan to find sensible values for lowest speed, highest speed, and I sat there watching it figure out the best control scheme for my CPU fan while all I could think was "Awwww, that's AWESOME". I've not seen anything like that before. It's like there's this one guy at Biostar writing BIOSes who takes some pride in his work.
I tried the option to unlock the extra core, but alas it failed - can't blame anyone but AMD for that one though. I guess they disable these things for a reason. With that in mind though, it was time to overclock the 3 cores I had as much as possible.
Now, I wasn't expecting much in terms of overclock ability from this board. It states a 95W TDP limit for the CPU for one thing, so it's not going to be able to push much power. All the options are there though so I started to crank up the bus speed, limit the memory speed, crank down the hypertransport. . . all that jazz.
It was then that I discovered the critical weakness of this board, when I tried to up the CPU core voltage. Turns out the default Vcore (1.375V I think) was the maximum it would allow me to select. What's doubly suspicious is that the selectable Vcore values go all the way down to 0.000V . . .and there are 3 entries for 0.000V, as if the whole range has been scaled down for my benefit in order to deny me any extra volts. For all the good points this board has, I just kind of find this unforgivable.
So, overclocking became a rather simple affair. No more volts allowed, how high can I crank the bus? The Athlon seemed to run stable at 3.8GHz, prime-95-ing okay for an hour but failing Linx within a minute. It was heartbreaking as I started to turn down the overclock and eventually settled at closer to 3.7GHz. . . just a little extra voltage and I think this chip would be good be 4GHz.
Other than that, no issues to speak of. It's fairly well specced, with 4 SATAs and an IDE port, the usual complement of USB headers and so on. I was taken a little by surprise when I started getting audio out of the on-board DVI port. I was connected to my monitor by DVI at the PC to an HDMI input on the monitor - I didn't even realise that was possible.
So in conclusion, not as bad as I expected, and I wouldn't buy another. It will end up being one of the kid's PCs, replacing an aging Athlon X2 rig, so overclocking and such isn't a big deal - it really just needs to play Minecraft and Sims 3. Next time I will pay the little extra I think and get Gigabyte/Asus like I normally do.
I have difficulty understanding Biostar. You know from the start that you're buying cheap, and it shows - no paper "manual" as such, and the PDF on the CD is fairly sketchy too. They do come with a fold-out quick-guide though which actually I really like - tells you everything you need to know when you're building it without wading through explainations of the bios and approved memory configurations.
On the other hand though, once you get going you start thinking it's not so bad after all. The package came with some nice SATA cables, and the board doesn't feel particularly cheap - not like unboxing an ECS board used to.
There are some lovely touches on this board. For instance, in the BIOS there's the most sophisticated fan control I've ever seen - options for voltage control, 3 pin or 4 pin PWM, and even a fan-calibration option. I pressed enter and it starting running my CPU fan to find sensible values for lowest speed, highest speed, and I sat there watching it figure out the best control scheme for my CPU fan while all I could think was "Awwww, that's AWESOME". I've not seen anything like that before. It's like there's this one guy at Biostar writing BIOSes who takes some pride in his work.
I tried the option to unlock the extra core, but alas it failed - can't blame anyone but AMD for that one though. I guess they disable these things for a reason. With that in mind though, it was time to overclock the 3 cores I had as much as possible.
Now, I wasn't expecting much in terms of overclock ability from this board. It states a 95W TDP limit for the CPU for one thing, so it's not going to be able to push much power. All the options are there though so I started to crank up the bus speed, limit the memory speed, crank down the hypertransport. . . all that jazz.
It was then that I discovered the critical weakness of this board, when I tried to up the CPU core voltage. Turns out the default Vcore (1.375V I think) was the maximum it would allow me to select. What's doubly suspicious is that the selectable Vcore values go all the way down to 0.000V . . .and there are 3 entries for 0.000V, as if the whole range has been scaled down for my benefit in order to deny me any extra volts. For all the good points this board has, I just kind of find this unforgivable.
So, overclocking became a rather simple affair. No more volts allowed, how high can I crank the bus? The Athlon seemed to run stable at 3.8GHz, prime-95-ing okay for an hour but failing Linx within a minute. It was heartbreaking as I started to turn down the overclock and eventually settled at closer to 3.7GHz. . . just a little extra voltage and I think this chip would be good be 4GHz.
Other than that, no issues to speak of. It's fairly well specced, with 4 SATAs and an IDE port, the usual complement of USB headers and so on. I was taken a little by surprise when I started getting audio out of the on-board DVI port. I was connected to my monitor by DVI at the PC to an HDMI input on the monitor - I didn't even realise that was possible.
So in conclusion, not as bad as I expected, and I wouldn't buy another. It will end up being one of the kid's PCs, replacing an aging Athlon X2 rig, so overclocking and such isn't a big deal - it really just needs to play Minecraft and Sims 3. Next time I will pay the little extra I think and get Gigabyte/Asus like I normally do.
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