Even at standard clock speed we found the temperature of the chipset was higher than we liked so we installed a case fan to ensure there was airflow across the passive cooler.

Overclocking with the Biostar is a fairly simple process. We stuck with the traditional method of working in the BIOS rather than using the Biostar Windows utility as the BIOS offered all the features that we needed. We disabled Cool ‘n Quiet, increased the CPU and Uncore voltages and then raised the base clock speed in a series of steps. We were able to overclock our 2.6GHz CPU to 3.45GHz with a base clock speed of 265MHz which is fairly impressive however when we went to 270MHz the system froze and we had to clear the BIOS.

Overall we found that the TA790GX XE delivered impressive performance but we were unconvinced by the list of features on this Micro-ATX motherboard. It will serve reasonably well in a basic desktop PC, especially if you have case mounted USB ports, but it doesn't seem to be much cop if you're building a Media Centre as the passive cooler on the chipset is too small and the lack of digital audio is a surprising oversight.

Verdict

Biostar has delivered a strange mishmash of a motherboard in the TA790GX XE, mainly because it lacks some basic features and doesn't have a great layout. However, while we're not entirely won over by its charms there is no denying that it is very cheap and is still perfectly capable.