We’ve received two representatives of the new AMD 880G chipset which should, unlike AMD’s 890GX, bring somewhat lower performance, but at a significant price decrease. Budget users are certainly going to appreciate this, especially those that have been perfectly happy with older AMD chipsets from the 7-series.
The first motherboard we’ve received for testing came in from Biostar, and is one of the representatives of their popular T-series. The Micro ATX format of Biostar TA880G HD board enables its use in HTPC machines and smaller enclosures. There’s the mandatory integrated DirectX 10.1 ATI Radeon 4250 graphics card, which means that hardware playback and high-res video conversion are in the list of features supported by this piece of hardware. The graphics card can be easily overclocked by pressing a single key (F7) while the system is booting, so that you can increase graphics chip performance as needed from 560 to 700 MHz, which gives exactly the performance of a Radeon 4290.
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The bundle is standard, more or less, and consists of three SATA cables, one molex/SATA power adapter, a manual, driver disc and backpanel. The layout is excellent bearing in mind the size of the motherboard, and three things are instantly noticeable: solid capacitors all around the motherboard, a 4-pin CPU power connector and the non-existence of a PATA connector. Now, a 4-pin CPU power connector usually means limited overclock capabilities, especially with a quad-core CPU. In the case of this motherboard that has five-phase voltage filtering, however, we really can’t consider the lack of an 8-pin connector as a flaw, since we’ve been perfectly able to overclock even the latest AMD six-core CPU using it. AMD Phenom II X6 1090T BE was working perfectly at 4080 MHz, an excellent result for a CPU with a default clock of 3.2 GHz.
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We need to mention, though, that the tested sample suffered from overvolting at times during overclocking sessions, with the motherboard increasing the set value of 1.5 V all the way up to 1.56 V. Therefore, pay attention to this fact while testing your own CPU. Although the motherboard doesn’t possess a PATA connector, there is the option of mounting additional brackets with support for the parallel and serial port. Standard reset and power buttons are also present on the motherboard itself, so that you can immediately test out the configuration before mounting the motherboard in the enclosure. Default frequencies keep the chipset warm and the achieved results were in compliance with the specs, while overclocking increased the temperatures quite a bit, so a good airflow is imperative in these situations.
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