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Biostar's TA75M+ motherboard is a micro-ATX entry level platform with relatively robust onboard graphics care of the AMD Fusion APU processor and thorough storage options via AMDs A75 chipset. Built around the AMD Fusion A75 chipset, the board supports socket FM1 AMD A8/A6-series processors which feature integrated graphics in the form of a Radeon HD 6550D/6530D graphics core.
78% Rating:
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360-Degree Motherboard Gallery: Biostar A75M+
Biostar's TA75M+ motherboard has a pair of
PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots that operate at x16 and x4 mode respectively,
or 8GB/s and 2GB/s per direction. A single PCI Express x1 and PCI slot complete
the list of expansion options.
Along the bottom edge of the Biostar TA75M+ motherboard we find headers for
the following ports: front panel audio, COM port, SP/DIF, Infrared, (1) USB 3.0
and (3) USB 2.0 headers. Furthermore, the TA75M+ has three fan headers peppered around
it's mATX surface.
Six native
6Gb/s SATA III ports (RAID 0,1,10) are supplied via the AMD A75 chipset. The
SATA ports are lined up in a row so closely it's difficult to
access the metal release clips on each SATA cable without first
removing the adjacent cable. As you can seen by the image below, if all SATA
ports are populated the user literally needs to remove all of them
to disengage one of them.
Biostar's TA75M+ board comes with
a handy Port80 debug card and physical Power and Reset buttons for out of the box tweaking. The AMD A75
chipset communicates with the AMD A8 Fusion APU over a Unified Media Interface (UMI)
interface at 2GB/s.
AMD's A75 chipset largely fills the role of a traditional Southbridge,
so cooling only requires a small passive aluminum heatsink.
Biostar's
TA75M+ motherboard has four DDR3 DIMMs that support up to 32GB of dual channel DDR3-800/1066/1333/1600/1866MHz memory. Memory densities up
to 8GB are supported. If used, the IGP will allocate
up to 512MB of system memory to itself.
AMD Socket FM1
motherboards support AMD A8 and A6 Fusion processors (FPU) such as the
AMD A8-3850 CPU PCSTATS will be testing this board with.
The Fusion APU includes an integrated graphics processor, memory controller and
PCI Express bus.
We're happy the AMD heatsink retention
cage hasn't changed much since the introduction of the original Athlon 64 CPU nearly a
decade ago. An AMD heatsink made back should still work fine with flagship
processors as TDP has been kept at pretty constant 125W.
On this
corner of the Biostar TA75M+ board we find a small passive heatsink cooling the boards' VRM
circuitry and power MOSFETs. It's nice to see Biostar using all
solid state capacitors on it's motherboards these days.
While USB
2.0's 480Mb/s maximum bandwidth was enough for many years, USB 3.0 expands the
bandwidth to a whopping 4.8Gb/s (4800Mb/s) which is more appropriate for today's
large mass storage devices.
Next up,
overclocking and BIOS screen shots.
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