We’ve previously reviewed motherboards based on AMD’s 880 and 890 chips, and now the time has come to take a look at 870, which, as its name suggests, presents us with the weakest variant of AMD’s new generation chip. Biostar’s TA870+ motherboard uses the SB850 southbridge in conjunction with this chip, therefore integrating native 6 Gbps support, but (as we know from previous tests) has no USB 3.0 ports. Biostar decided not to include them via a separate controller, which helped retain the price on an acceptably low level. The 870 chip itself contains no graphics core, and its consumption should be around 13 W.

This motherboard is an integral part of the T series and therefore coloured typically Biostar - red and black. Its declaration specifies a full ATX size, but it’s actually not as wide (22.5 instead of 24 cm), which, however, hasn’t impacted the quality of the layout, which is quite up to par. The thing that hardware enthusiasts are bound to notice first is the lack of any sort of cooling on the 5-phase voltage section, as well as a 4-pin CPU voltage connector instead of an 8-pin one, which may lead you to conclude that this motherboard doesn’t support newer quad-core and stronger models with high consumption. However, we were using a six-core Phenom II during testing, and it proved to be rock-stable, but these characteristics will prove to have affected another aspect of this motherboard later on. By the way, the motherboard contains red LEDs, which signalize the number of currently active voltage phases, which is interesting until the enclosure is closed. 

All SATA ports support transfer rates of up to 6 Gbps and are split into two groups, which appears to us as a good idea, since users will be able to adjust the cabling to their needs and current conditions. The remaining ports are present in more than sufficient quantities, so no remarks on that side. As expected for a T-series motherboard, only shielded capacitors have been used, and both north- and southbridge have their own coolers, which are not connected by heatpipes, but have proven to be more than adequate anyway. While the motherboard is perfectly stable and a great choice for working in ordinary, non-overclocked mode, our overclocking experience has not been as good. The BIOS is largely the same as in all recently tested Biostar motherboards, but one illogical thing becomes obvious: the option of changing the CPU multiplier is completely absent, despite our using a Black Edition CPU with an unlocked multiplier! 

To make it even stranger, TA870+ still includes the regular BIO unlocKING function for testing out turned off cores on dual-core and triple-core CPUs, which means that owners of Phenom II X2 and X3 will be in a better position with this motherboard than owners of the full-fledged quad-core Black Editions, despite the latter being more easily overclockable. The consequence of all this was that we couldn’t reach any further than 3.7 GHz with our six-core Phenom II, which went up to 4.1 GHz on previously tested motherboards. A quad-core model would’ve fared better perhaps, but this case seems to have been a very good reality check, which reminded us that we were dealing with a motherboard more than a hundred euros cheaper than the aforementioned premium models.