Biostar Launches First AMD Dragon MoBo

Monday Biostar unveiled the very first Dragon Platform qualified motherboard, the TA790GX A3+

According to the company, the TA790GX A3+ uses Biostar's Green Power Utility, enhancing energy efficiency by disabling extra phases while the CPU carries a light load.  The integrated GUI monitors what the CPU is resourcing, and then responds by optimizing the power consumption. The board also uses a 4+1-phase VRM design, enhancing the overclocking ability for the Phenom/PhenomII CPU. The TA790GX A3+ natively supports DDR3 memory up to 1333MHz as well, and sports 100 percent solid capacitors.

Biostar says that the TA790GX A3+  utilizes the AMD 790GX+SB750 chipset, designed to support an 5200 MT/s HyperTransport 3.0 (HT3.0) interface and PCI Express 2.0 x 16 graphics. For more graphical power, Biostar slapped in ATI's Radeon HD 3300, however gamers can take advantage of ATI CrossFire X technology, enabling two or more graphics processors to work together to improve system performance. The TA790GX A3+ supports up to four ATI Radeon HD graphics cards as well, and even enables ATI's Hybrid CrossFireX technology under a Windows Vista environment. The board comes packed with a built-in HDMI/DVI connector with HDCP support of 1080p HD resolution, and on-board 128 MB DDR2 side-port memory for that extra oomph with a max shared up to 512MB.

Additionally, end-users can update the TA790GX A3+ BIOS via a USB flash stick before entering the OS. Consumers can even bring the BIOS back to life - if corrupted - through the board's BIO-ReLife technology. The TA790GX A3+ also features a few other nifty additions including a hardware installation debugger using LED indicators, a rapid switch to allow users to test the board without short-circuiting the wrong pins, and an overclocking setting within the BIOS itself.

Biostar's TA790GX A3+ supports the AMD Phenom II X4 (Socket AM3), the Phenom II X3 (Socket AM3), and features a maximum CPU TDP (thermal Design Power) of 140Watt. The board contains 4 DDR3 DIMM memory slots (supporting up to 16 GB memory), 2 PCI slots, 2 PCI-E x1 2.0 slots, and 2 PCI-E x16 2.0 slots. On the storage side, the board has 6 SATA2 2Gb/s connectors, 1 IDE connector, and supports STAT RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. For a total list of hardware specs, head here.