Biostar's TA990FXE board supports up to 32GB of DDR3-800/1066/1333/1600/1866MHz memory in four DIMMs, or 4GB for 32-bit operating systems. Memory can be overclocked to 2000MHz.

AMD Socket AM3+ motherboards support 45nm chips like the FX-8150 Bulldozer series and previous socket AM3 flagship processors such as the Phenom II X6 1100T. The CPU to system bus is 6400MT/s, Hypertransport 3.

One nice aspect of AMDs processors is that the heatsink retention cage hasn't changed at all since the introduction of the original Athlon 64 nearly 8 years ago. An AMD heatsink made back then will still work fine with flagship processors as TDP has been kept at pretty constant 125W.

The AMD 990FX chipset is cooled by a simple passive heatsink connected to the motherboard VRM circuitry by a single heatpipe. The TA990FXE layout shouldn't conflict with standard socket AM3+ CPU thermal solutions.

Physical power and reset switches make it easy to tweak the Biostar TA990FXE motherboard during overclocking experiments outside of a case.

Now let's get to overclocking this motherboard!