BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A85S3 Ver. 6.1 FM2 AMD A85X (Hudson D4) HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Visually attractive. Simple packaging. Narrow; should fit in virtually any case. Excellent onboard audio; very loud and clean. SATA ports and expansion slots intelligently laid out. Has significant overclocking functionality. Supports XMP perfectly. Stable and fast, fast, fast!

Cons: Almost no accessories included. No paper manual. UEFI is somewhat poorly translated; documentation is sparse. Only two RAM slots. Poor use of rear panel space; very few USB ports; wasteful dual PS/2.

Other Thoughts: Strongly recommend acquiring newest drivers from AMD and Realtek directly, as the drivers on Biostar's site are quite outdated at the time of this writing. Windows 7 SP1 supports AMD AHCI controller without a third party driver.

Pros: Needed a motherboard/CPU combo to upgrade an aging P4 system. When I got this motherboard, it came with 8GB of DDR3-1600 ram, so when I added a $49 A4-5300 APU, that gave me a 5x faster system for under $200. I coupled it with a SSD and now WEI is 6.1 (limited by the CPU assessment). Blazing fast for everything the user needs (internet, youtube, office). Drivers included on CD instead of online, definite PRO! Easy BIOS/CMOS setup, but I didn't tweak it beyond boot order for installing Windows on MBR instead of UEFI. The board itself looks great in black, but it's inside a dusty HP case now :)

Cons: Doesn't apply to the product because it was my own stupidity to think I could use the existing optical drives (IDE) in the new system. So my friend got a Lite-On SATA optical drive as well as the SSD, so the whole system is brand-new except for his old file storage drive. Shows how recently I've built a system if I can't even remember that IDE is less common as a standard feature than VGA output!

Other Thoughts: Only one case fan header, on the end of the board with the front-usb and power switch headers. Makes more sense to put a case fan header near the ports, as that's where most case fans are, but my fan's cable was plenty long to make it work. Haven't had a chance to try overclocking (didn't pair it with fast RAM or unlocked APU) or USB3 yet.

Pros: Actually bought Biostar TA75MH2 (black friday) but apparently no longer sold at Newegg. Decent board, was able to get working (acceptably) in about 8 hours. Minor sleep/wake issue persists.

Cons: Biostar's rebate program is a scam, they don't honor their promotions, and they don't ignore emails on overdue rebates.

Newegg, I implore you to stop advertising these false offers...you know who these manufactures are, and Biostar has got to be near the top of the list. I also purchased with Google buyer protection but don't expect any help there either.

Other Thoughts: A4 CPU
Kingston HyperX SSD
G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600

Pros: Hudson D4. HDMI , SATA 6 , and onboard USB 3.0.
Came with 8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM for free....and the RAM actually is working.

Cons: BIOS is a little different from most other boards , but it really isn't that bad. Just a small learning curve.
It auto set my RAM to 1333 , but no biggie , I just went into BIOS and set it to 1600.

Other Thoughts: Over all , I am happy with this board.
It is used in a media center / light gaming build.
My specs:
-This board
-AMD A4-5300 Trinity 3.4GHz (Dual Core)
-Western Digital WD Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
-2x4 GB DDR3 1600 RAM (by TEAM: Vulcan series)
-A spare 500W Power Supply
-A spare DVD-RW Drive
-Rosewill FBM-01 Dual Fans MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case
Very happy as everything is working fine.
No need for a graphics card for awhile.
I only put a little over $200 in this rig.

Pros: This board is Sweet...Got it today, had it running in 2 hrs.
I`ve built maybe 45 t0 50 computers over the last 18 years & this is the smallest board I`ve ever used & I`ve used 7 or so micro ATX boards. Biostar has good boards.
5 of the last 6 computers I build I used Biostar, They have been trouble free and dependable.

Cons: None so far

Pros: Great motherboard. Its small and fits into case nicely. handles everything it needs to and has great bios.

Cons: none.

Other Thoughts: Got this mobo because it has D4 northbridge. Would get this board over D2 or D3.

Pros: I used this in a HTPC build for my showroom floor and it has been running like a champ for a few months now. It's on nearly 24 hours a day, handles the A10 quite nicely and has all the basics at a reasonable price.

Cons: Do i wish it had DVI and more audio ports on the back? Sure, but not at additional cost.

Other Thoughts: The board is missing some key features that people look for in a higher end motherboard, which this is not, that aren't needed for a HTPC build. The only negative I can think of is the 6 channel audio, which should have been upped to 7.1 if they intended this to be for home theater use.

Pros: Easy to install with good instructions. Sata lll 6 ports,usb 3.0, Hdmi

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: This was my first build everything went smooth.I got 8gb of ram free with this board which i thought was a great deal. The ram was [DOA] but newegg took care it with no problem not going to give bad review because of bad ram. I now have a nice computer for me at a small cost little over $200 I used a amd A4-5300 cpu,8gb ram,sentey mini tower,elite 460 ps, 24x dvd, 500gb refurb wd blue hd. Very happy

Pros: Features, it really has them all.

Cons: Weird bios.

Pros: This is a good solid motherboard with great sound. It has all the newer features a modern motherboard should have such as usb3.0 and 6Gb/s sata and hdmi. However I have not had much luck with overclocking with this motherboard.

Cons: The overclocking features are there in the BIOS, however I can not get them to work correctly. I have disabled the throttling features such as powernow and C6 state. I can get a stable 4.3ghz overclock with the A10-5800k but under full load it will still throttle to 14x multiplier. It will also throttle with stock clocks. You would not notice this unless you have cpu-z running while running prime95. I do not believe this to be an overheating issue as temp monitoring software says max temp under load is 39c.

Other Thoughts: I really don't know for sure if its the motherboard or processor that is causing the throttling issue. Anyone else have this problem? Alos if someone else with a A10-5800k could run CPU-z and prime 95 with stock clock speeds to see if it still throttles that would be great.