Biostar TA690G AM2 AMD 690G Motherboard Review

The Biostar TA690G AM2 has one PCI Express x16 slot for videocards, one PCI Express x1 slot for high bandwidth devices and two PCI slots. The boards' COM and Parallel printer ports are implemented as headers, but the brackets are not included in the box.

Four 3.0GB/s SATA channels enable RAID 0/1/10. The Biostar TA690G AM2 motherboard has four fan headers, and relies on totally passive chipset heatsinks which are of course totally silent. In a nod towards user friendliness, the TA690G AM2 has hard power and reset buttons in the bottom corner.

The 24 pin ATX, single IDE and single Floppy connectors are positioned to the right of the DDR2 DIMM slots on the Biostar TA690G AM2 motherboard. Insert the DDR2 memory in alternating slots (same colour) to enable dual channel memory support. The board has only one IDE channel.

The AMD 690G chipset is located right next to the socket AM2 AMD processor socket, and there is a good deal of space for larger after market cooling solutions. The memory slots are up close against the CPU socket, so room on this side is a bit tight. A 4-pin PWM fan header is positioned near to the CPU socket for the CPU heatsink and fan, it is backwards compatible with 3-pin fan plugs.