As we draw closer to the launch of Intel’s 5th Generation chipset and the launch of the Haswell-refresh processors, images and details on each vendors motherboards is continually coming to light; the latest coming from Biostar. Although there is no printed specifications on what the board has to offer, we can take quite a bit of information by looking at he board itself. The first item we have to detail however is the colour scheme. When Asus came to launch their Haswell X87 boards last year, the decision to use a gold / yellow theme across the heatsinks and DIMM / PCIe lanes was quite controversial with many people, including myself to be honest not quite taking to the scheme. Biostar however don’t appear to be afraid of this hatred and thus we get a yellow / gold mismatch that would certainly be popular in the far east, as opposed to the European markets where blue, orange, green and red is more popular.
Connectivity wise the Hi-Fi board offers, two PCIe x16 lanes in yellow with two x1 lanes in black along with a pair of legacy PCI lanes for backwards compatibility, four DIMM slots which we imagine will support up to 32GB of 2800MHz+ RAM like most other boards, 6 SATA III ports and an onboard M.2 adaptor for the next generation SSDs. Additionally the USB3.0 header has been moved back to the side of the board – something which confused us considerably when we saw the Z77 Hi-Fi board come to market a couple of years back. As the name suggests we also have the Puro Hi-Fi onboard audio controller with Hi-Fi AMPs and Caps for the best 7.1ch audio that Biostar have to offer.
On the I/O panel we find dual Gigabit LAN, four USB3.0 ports, two USB2.0, HDMI, DVI and VGA display outputs supporting 4K resolutions, a PS/2 combo port and 7.1ch audio with a S/PDIF output for good measure.
Obviously the colour scheme is a little marmite with a few of us here not liking the colours that much, however as always there are people who will like it; either way be sure to keep an eye out of a full review on this board when the 5th Gen chipset is launched in the next few weeks.
Source: Biostar
Apparently this dreadful colour scheme is very popular among the Chinese and as we all know how big a market China is. Don’t be surprised to see other manufacturers adopt it as well.