Biostar TA890FXE Review
CPU Benchmarks
Published: 14th September 2010 | Source: Biostar | Price: £106 |
CPU Performance
SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility capable of benchmarking the performance of individual components inside a PC.
CPU Arithmetic
Like for like, we find the similarly priced ASRock and Biostar performing almost identically with each other. Meanwhile, the overclocked Phenom II performs exactly as it should with Dhrystone scores in the ~85GIPS ballpark.
CPU Multimedia
A similar story unravels with the CPU Multimedia test. Thankfully SiSoft Sandra's CPU benchmarks have a very low error margin, making it very easy to compare testbed results.
CPU Queen
CPU Queen is based on branch prediction and the misprediction penalties that are involved.
Again, the two boards perform very similarly - within 100 points of each other.
These scores are very much in line with what one would expect from a X6 1090T processor.
CPU Photoworxx
PhotoWorxx as the name may suggest tests processors by means of invoking functions that are common to Photo Manipulation including Fill, Flip, Crop, Rotate, Difference and Colour to B&W conversion.
Annoyingly, we find the Photoworxx test to suffer from a bit of a discrepency error. Usually this test is repeated a little more than necessary in order to find concordant results, but ultimately we find the two motherboards performing on par with each other, as expected.
CPU ZLib
This is an integer based benchmark that will test the CPU and Memory by means of the CPU ZLib compression library.
Nothing particularly surprising here either. Perhaps WinRar might reveal something that the ZLib test cannot..?
WinRAR
WinRAR's embedded Benchmark focuses on the processor's File Compression capability.
While Stock vs Stock results appear very similar, the overclocked result (particularly the Multithreaded outcome) seemed a little on the low side for a +700MHz clockspeed increase across six cores.
Most Recent Comments

Firstly the colour scheme is horrid. Red and black? win. Red black and white? lose.
The slot layout is absolutely awful meaning you could (as has been pointed out) only get away with dual double slotters, meaning the whole excercise is a bit pointless.
And the price? 'sa bad kitty.. The MSI fuzion thing reviewed last week costs less, looks a metric ton of poo better and is an MSI. I know it only had two PCIE slots (full size) but you ain't giving up anything considering this one here is laid out so that you can only use two at once any way.
I mean, who would want to fit single slot cards into a high performance PC?
So the MSI wins the day here for me. It also has Lucid and costs less (though arguably not by much) but when you consider that Lucid chip and the royalties cost a pretty penny? It just packs the mud down even harder over the grave of the Biostar's sealed fate.Quote
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