Biostar TA890FXE Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

As explained earlier, the AMD 890FX chipset is a dual-chip solution using the SB850 south bridge chip. This chip natively supports six SATA-600 ports (with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10) and on TA890FXE Biostar decided to put one of these ports on the rear panel as an eSATA-600 port. Four of the internal ports are placed on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them, as you can see in Figure 4. The fifth port is installed on the traditional orientation and video cards installed on the forth PCI Express x16 slot may block it.

Figure 4: SATA-600 ports, ATA-133 port and POST diagnostics display.

The manufacturer added an ATA-133 port on this motherboard, which may be useful to users trying to install older optical and hard disk drives. This port is controlled by a VIA VT6330, which is also a FireWire controller.

No floppy disk drive controller is present.

This motherboard has 12 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and six through three headers located on the motherboard.

Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are provided, one standard-sized on the rear panel and one through a header on the motherboard. They are controlled by a VIA VT6330 chip.

The motherboard doesn’t come with I/O brackets for you to use the extra USB and FireWire ports.

Eight-channel audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC892 codec. Unfortunately this component isn’t listed on Realtek’s website, so we can’t comment on audio quality. TA890FXE comes with optical and coaxial SPDIF outputs and you can route digital audio to video cards to have digital audio available on HDMI connectors by installing the appropriate cable on the “JSPDIFOUT1” header available.  

The analog audio connectors are independent, so you won’t have to “kill” the line in or mic in jacks if you decide to install an analog 7.1 speaker set.

Biostar TA890FXE has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111DL chip, which is connected to the system using a PCI Express x1 lane and thus not presenting any potential performance issues.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel with keyboard and mouse PS/2 co
nnectors, optical SPDIF output, coaxial SPDIF output, six USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, one eSATA-600 port, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel.

Other smaller features are available. As you can see in Figure 4, this product comes with a POST diagnostics display, allowing you to discover through a two-digit code what is wrong with your computer if it is not turning on.

This motherboard supports one legacy serial port through a header called “J_COM1.” It doesn’t come with the I/O bracket that is required to use it. This motherboard also comes with an infrared interface (“CIR1” header), allowing you to easily install an infrared sensor to allow your computer to communicate to other infrared devices (e.g., remote control).

This board also has on-board power and reset buttons, which are quite handy when debugging your PC.