Biostar's Releases New Gaming Z97X and Gaming Z97W Motherboards

[scolaner]

Biostar announced that it has two new flagship motherboards for Intel's Haswell and Broadwell processors with the Gaming Z97X and Gaming Z97W.

Biostar's Releases New Gaming Z97X and Gaming Z97W Motherboards : Read more

 

[dovah-chan]

Not too shabby at all, Biostar. Hardly did I ever expect them to come out with a decent looking and quite possibly feature filled Z97 board. The brown is a little questionable but they're trying to go in a different direction than everyone else and I can see it working out. I love the clever design of the M.2 port and hope to see other manufacturers doing this. I like the front 5.25" bay device thing (like the ROG base station thing) as a nice value add-on and the ALC898 is a solid codec (although the ALC1150 is a bit more standard on higher-end boards).

My one complaint is that it could use more SATA ports. I mean 4 on the Z97W board? That's one SSD boot drive and one storage drive and you only got two ports left. Sheesh. Even my MSI Z87-G45 which was only $120 on sale has 6 ports.

Hoping to read the reviews and maybe grab one for myself to play around with.

 

[FFH]

Can someone explain to me why it needs heat spreaders? It doesn't make it look nicer. I have heat spreaders on my RAM, but I never overclocked it so it's kind of useless. I guess it would be great for overclocking, but it would probably get in the way of installing some of the larger aftermarket air-cooled CPU heatsinks. Anyway it has a nice design. It reminds me of the Asus Republic of gamers motherboard.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Biostar often gets looked at as a bad maker of boards, but they really aren't so bad. They usually build very solid boards and save cost by not adding additional software they would need to pay licenses for, like THX, using cheaper chips, and cutting features that are rarely used. So they tend to do well.

It would of been better had they added a few more SATA ports on the 97W though. Likely most won't use them, but its not a big cost.

 

[EagleDesignInc]

Appearance doesn't look to bad at all, but without the price is hard to say if I would buy it or not...

 

[Lutfij]

In Biostar's defense, both mobo's support 6 SATA devices native off the Z97 chipset if and when you aren't going to use the M.2 slot and/or SATA Express. I was skeptical at first but I followed on the products site and manuals.

All in all, the boards are a break from the red and black generic "gaming" market and they seem to have a few more bells and whistles as the other mid-high end boards. Question would be how well laid out is their BIOS's?

 

[Terry Perry]

I have had 3 Bio Boards over the years and all 3 went out in 6 months. But my Gig. boards are still working a P35 and a 968 they are 5-7 years old and still fire up. My new Z97 is a Gig and it went up with no hassle. Plus the Duo Bios is a real seller for me a back up never hurts. I will always be a Gigabyte Man.

 

[Calculatron]

My previous main rig had a Biostar board which served me faithfully, and now my secondary rig sports one. They're good boards for the price-point, because that is what they are built for.

It's interesting that Biostar has decided to enter the "gaming" market. (Or have they produced other gaming-orientated products? I don't think they have...)

 

[Icon86]

What warrants a manufacturer to use the word "Gaming" as a tag for their equipment? Buzz words where there is no spec just irritate me.

 

[thekyle64]

they look nice