Biostar Tforce 6100-939 Motherboard 

Biostar has introduced their latest version of AMD Socket

939 based motherboard with the latest NVIDIA Nforce4 chipset (codenamed C51).

Its onboard video really caught our fancy, being based on the NVIDIA GeForce

6100 GPU chip and NVIDIA nForce 410 chips.

This Biostar Tforce has MicroATX form factor and supports

4x1 GB DDR400 memory in its four DIMMs (No support for DDR2). Two SATA-2 slots

with transfer rates up to 3Gb/s and two IDE slots should keep it future proof as

well as backward compatible. It also has six channel audio support onboard.

Considering connectivity, it has four USB 2.0 ports in the rear, supports four

more in the front, and an SPDIF connector for external audio as well as a 10/100

Mbps Ethernet port. Biostar has also given it one PCI-E x16 and one PCI-E x1

slot, plus the usual two PCI slots.

The real surprise came when we put this board into action.

We used AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR400 RAM and a 80GB 7,200

rpm Maxtor SATA HDD to test. We never expected any great performance from the

onboard graphics card. But it scored 661 on 3DMark 2005 test, which is quite

remarkable for onboard graphics. We got 59.4 in MCCW 2003 and 48 fps in Unreal

Tournament 2004. We then tested it with a real time DivX conversion of a 60 MB

MPEG video, and could complete it in 105 secs. These are quite remarkable scores

as it came near to Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9 board that we tested in this issue.

Bottom Line: Given that it's an entry-level board,

the board gives great performance for its price.

Abe Kurian