Biostar TH55XE Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

Intel H55 chipset is a single-chip solution. The basic features provided by this chipset include six SATA-300 ports (no RAID support), no support for parallel ATA (PATA) ports, 12 USB 2.0 ports supporting port disable, embedded Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Medium Access Control) and six x1 PCI Express lanes.

Biostar TH55XE provides five SATA-300 ports. The sixth port was converted into an eSATA-300 port on the rear panel. The SATA connectors are installed on the corner of the motherboard and thus the video card (if you install one) won’t block them. In Figure 4 you can also see how this motherboard has on-board power and reset buttons.

Figure 4: SATA ports.

Even though Intel H55 chipset does not provide a parallel ATA port, Biostar TH55XE has one, controlled by a JMicron JMB368 chip.

From the 12 USB 2.0 ports supported by the chipset the motherboard comes with 10 of them, four soldered on the rear panel and six available through three motherboard headers. Two FireWire (IEEE1394) ports are available, one on the rear panel and one through an internal header, controlled by an LSI FW322 chip.

This motherboard has a parallel and a serial port, shown in Figure 5. In order to use them you need adapters that don’t come with the product.

Figure 5: Parallel and serial port headers.

Audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC888 codec, which has a relatively good audio quality, providing 7.1 audio with 24-bit resolution, 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, 192 kHz sampling rate for its outputs and 96 kHz sampling rate for its inputs. For working professionally with audio capture and editing (converting LPs and VHS tapes to digital format, for example) we recommend you to look for a motherboard with a codec that provides at least 95 dB SNR on its analog inputs.

Biostar TH55XE comes with an on-board optical SPDIF output, which is great. However, this board doesn’t have an on-board SPDIF header, so you can’t install an adapter to have coaxial SPDIF output.

Analog audio outputs use completely independent jacks, so you can hook-up an analog surround speaker system up to 7.1 without needing to “kill” the line in and/or mic in jacks.

Biostar TH55XE has a Gigabit Ethernet port controlled by a Realtek RTL8111BL controller, which is connected to the system through a PCI Express x1 lane, thus allowing this port to achieve its maximum performance.

In Figure 6, you can see the motherboard rear panel with Mouse PS/2 connector, keyboard PS/2 connector, optical SPDIF output, HDMI output, DVI-D output, VGA output, four USB 2.0 ports, FireWire port, eSATA-300 port, Gigabit Ethernet port and independent 7.1 analog audio jacks.

Figure 6: Motherboard rear panel.

This motherboard comes with the three most common types of video connection, VGA, DVI-D and HDMI, but only two of them can be used at the same time.

This motherboard has an on-board infrared interface, so you can just buy and install the sensors to have the ability to communicate using this interface.