Out of all the motherboard companies that went out of business, how did Biostar survive?

[VirtualLarry]

I've built a lot of low-budget builds back in my day. Biostar was pretty decent, if not inspiring.

 

[A///]

I had a few of their boards back in the day. They weren't fancy but decent and well built for their price range. Asrock took their place and asrock has put out some top bangers along with some junk in between over the years. Very good mix of budget and features. Support for Asrock isn't as good as the main three brands but the user to user support is good. Soyo is a brand I've neither seen nor heard of in at least 22-24 years. They did early Pentiums and AMD whatevers iirc.

 

[tcsenter]

Necro!

 

[GodisanAtheist]

ECS Motherboards.

Always a rock solid cheap option from Fry's when you screwed up your actual good Asus or Gigabyte.

End up running the ECS "back up" for 2 years till the next major CPU launch upgrade cycle.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

ECS Motherboards.

Always a rock solid cheap option from Fry's when you screwed up your actual good Asus or Gigabyte.

End up running the ECS "back up" for 2 years till the next major CPU launch upgrade cycle.

I did multiple builds for clients with the K7S5A BITD

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I did multiple builds for clients with the K7S5A BITD

Now that is a trip down memory lane.

We had 3-4 around various friends, a few more with various clients, it was always a rock solid board. The ability to reuse SDRAM was also a big plus.

 

[mindless1]

I only bought one of theirs, an nForce2 skt.A board, and to their credit the capacitors didn't pop, despite my pushing the o'c on it with the low end VRMs. However I did have an additional fan dedicated to cooling the area.

Heh, I soldered a 12ga wire to the back of that board to solve a vDroop issue from it running CPU VRM off 5V rail. It never died, just got retired.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I have a Biostar still running with a Phenom 720 that I built over 10 years ago. I used to use Epox and Shuttle boards then moved to ASUS. My newest board is an MSI.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a Biostar still running with a Phenom 720

Socket AM2(+), represent!

I built am AM2 rig for a friend, it lasted him 10 years. He was all like "I want my Next computer to last another 10 years!". I was like, tall order, bro.

Anyways, he's on a Ryzen 1200. It was a freebie placeholder from me, always meant for him to get an upgrade once he got more $$$ for a CPU, but that one's been holding steady.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I almost picked up a Biostar A320 board the other day. It was like $60 BNIB. I didn't do it because I am 99% certain I would not be able to tell the difference between it and a X570 board when gaming on it with the same parts.

The MSI A320 board I had was like that. PBO worked. XMP worked. The VRMs didn't overheat with a 6 core Zen 2 at the time. It worked flawlessly and you'd never know you weren't on X370/470.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It worked flawlessly and you'd never know you weren't on X370/470.

The "chipset" on AM4 is more of an I/O breakout box, then a "real" chipset. So it's not surprising if you don't need the additional features the X-series. Which amounts to more PCIe lanes and more USB ports, everything else is equal.

Where the real difference lies is the VRM setup. Most A320's use a 3-4+1 phase setup, which is fine as long as you stay within specs. But if you use the higher-end chips and push things, there are limits to how much power can be delivered.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Funny, I just built about half a dozen machines with the Biostar A320MH. It was cheap, it fits cases like the NR200, and as long as the CPU is not overclocked, it's rock-solid.
Soyo, on the other hand...

 

[JWMiddleton]

Back in the SETI I days when the TeAm was kickin' butt, I had a farm with a bunch of Biostar and Abit boards. The Abit boards were good for OC'ing Celeron 300 to 450. While the Biostar boards were cheap and worked. Note the Milk Create builds. John

 

[JWMiddleton]

Also, Foxconn might be the best mobo maker in the world. I really like how stable Dell and HP's office PCs are. Never seen them throwing up hardware related bluescreens in normal use.

In the past few years I've had a lot of experience with Dell OptiPlex and Precision Tower systems. They are nothing fancy, but I've been amazed at how bullet proof they seem to be. Corporation who buy these computers expect them to work, with minimal downtime. They are not interested in what is inside the case for office use. Then for engineering type work, they will spec out what they need and again just expect it to work. These machines, when off lease, make for a great option for most folks.

On Friday, as an early Christmas and birthday present, I gave a Precision T3620 to my 14 year old granddaughter. It came with a Xeon E3-1245 V6 CPU and Quadro M4000 GPU that I bought on Ebay for $205. For storage it had an M.2 boot drive and 4TB HDD. She spent all weekend either playing games on the computer or playing pickleball with my wife.



John

 

[igor_kavinski]

Note the Milk Create builds.

Tell us more!!!

Any disadvantages?

 

[JWMiddleton]

Got tired of buying cases and thought I'd give it a try. Well, you don't want to let any kids in the area who might stick their little fingers on something that could hurt them.

I was in a corporate apartment in Shereport, LA, while working on an IT project at the GM plant there. I was amazed that the apartment office didn't bitch about the electric bill as it was included. When that project was over after 4 years, I took the stuff home and had David McOwen take 5 of them to run. He put them in his attic on a piece of plywood. I was amazed that the heat didn't cause them to die, but they just kept on pumping out the work units.