Biostar TForce4 U 775

Rounding things up...

This board has a lot of great innovations, but there are several problems with the board too. Lets start with the good, before moving on to the problems that seem to plague an otherwise promising motherboard from Biostar.

The general layout is pretty good, aside from the positioning of the 24-pin ATX power connector. If Biostar had chosen a better place to locate that on the board, we feel that there would be very little to dislike about this board's layout. It's clean and every other component is close to the edge of the board, making installation a pleasure. Admittedly, there are some personal preferences in the layout, like the rotation of the IDE connectors, but - apart from the 24-pin ATX connector - there's virtually nothing wrong with its layout.

The BIOS is also pretty good too - it's well laid out and there are some great enthusiast-orientated features included in there. The ability to save BIOS settings with the CMOS reloaded utility is a great feature that we've really enjoyed using on DFI's nF4 SLI-DR motherboard. Another feature that we've previously seen on DFI's motherboard is the integrated Memtest86 test facility - it saves using a floppy drive to load Memtest86 in order to progressively check CPU and memory stability when overclocking without booting into Windows.

The other useful inclusion in the BIOS is the ability to boot straight into Biostar's flashing utility straight from the BIOS. You will still need a floppy drive loaded with the flash ROM, but it means one less floppy disk or CD to boot into the flash utility.

Probably the most impressive part of the TForce4 U 775 was its performance - this was quite literally superb in comparison to the Intel D975XBX desktop board, where it outperformed it in pretty much every scenario. It seems that Biostar has tweaked this board to get the absolute maximum out of it.

During normal use, the board was generally very stable and we didn't encounter any problems. However, things went down hill from there - the board was very promising up until we started to stress test it. The board consistently fell over in under two and a half hours with an application crash in 3DMark05 and a fatal error in Prime95.

This board is marketed as an enthusiast's board, but doesn't stand up to some heavy abuse. Admittedly, not every enthusiast is going to stress their motherboard to the levels that we do in our stress test. This is why we're reasonably lenient on the stress testing results as the programs we use could possibly have memory leakage issues. However, the fact that the Biostar TForce4 U 775 board suffered from an application crash and a fatal error in Prime95 in under three hours is not acceptable for an enthusiast-orientated motherboard.

Also, we were very disappointed with the way that this motherboard overclocked, too. An enthusiast-orientated motherboard should be capable of more than what we achieved. The Biostar TForce4 U 775 is nothing more than average in the overclocking department.

Value:

We were unable to find the Biostar TForce4 U 775 motherboard in stock anywhere in the UK, but Biostar indicated that the board was selling for around £76 including VAT. In the USA, we were able to find the board available on Newegg for $89.99.

Other Intel motherboards in the £70 to £80 price range include ABIT's NI8-SLI GR, which is selling for £64.03 including VAT on Scan. Scan also has Foxconn's NF4SLI7AA board available for £78.26 inc VAT. Those two boards are based on NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset and are selling for the same price (or less than) the Biostar TForce4 U 775 motherboard. Of course, there are many more motherboards based on different chipsets in that price range too.

Final Thoughts...

The Biostar TForce4 U 775 has a lot of promise in many areas, but we feel that Biostar needs to work on its stability before we'd consider recommending this motherboard. There are some great features in the motherboard BIOS and the performance of the board is generally good, as it outperformed Intel's D975XBX board by a considerable margin.

Ultimately, though, the board failed to produce the goods in the stability and overclocking departments. Biostar needs to work on the stability of the TForce4 U 775 before this board can be considered as a potentital buying option for hardware and gaming enthusiasts alike.