BIOSTAR RACING H170GT3 (LGA1151) Motherboard Review

John Williamson / 8 years ago

Software Overview

BIOSTAR’s eHot-Line utility is designed to offer technical support and gather information from your system. In theory, you’re meant to enter details of any technical problems and the information will be sent to a support agent. However, this is a very flawed and outdated notion because communication is generally quicker via traditional e-mail. Furthermore, if an issue arises, it generally stops the motherboard from booting. Therefore, the eHot-Line isn’t useful at all and should be discontinued.

The BIOSCreen tool replaces the default splash screen with an image of your choice. While the user-interface looks quite dated, it’s a neat feature and adds some customization to the motherboard.

Here we can see a brand new program from BIOSTAR which clearly looks much better than their previous attempts. This section displays information about the CPU, motherboard model and memory specification.

The Smart Ear application is used to adjust system volume and modify the gain. To be honest, this is very simplistic and takes up a large amount of screen real estate considering the kind of functionality on show.

Next up is the Vivid LED DJ which allows you to customize the LED audio path’s colour and LED strip positioned near the motherboard’s VRMs. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to cycle through 16.7 million colours automatically which is a crying shame. I’m sure this could be fixed easily enough with a software update though. BIOSTAR includes a solid colour mode and three other choices with wacky transitions. While this is a good start, I’d like to see a few more in the future. The motherboard incorporates a connector for an optional 5050 LED strip which can be controlled using this software.