BIOSTAR TA970 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

Pros: Very nice color combo
Good performance
Decent Price

Cons: only 4 eggs due to the BIOS being somewhat complex

Other Thoughts: Me and my brother bought MOBOs this month. He got an MSI board to replace his terrible Foxxcon one(went bad after a month), and I got this to replace my OEM HP one with a color scheme I like. His BIOS are 10x better looking and easier to use. Ultimately a good buy if you want a black-red color combo, good performance, and have time to drudge through the BIOS.

Pros: AM3+ out of the box
1866 DDR3 is simple
color scheme
quality

Cons: no USB 3.0 header
PCI-e x1 location
standoff/support locations
USB standby

Other Thoughts: Runs Zambezi out of the box - haven't tried Vishera. Runs memory in 1866 with very little effort. The black and red looks nice in my case. Build quality is excellent. Wish it had a USB 3.0 header. Wish the PCI slots were laid out a little differently. If you're using a dual slot GPU (who isn't?) then you'll cover one of the x1 slots - wish a PCI slot was here instead. As others have said I wish the motherboard standoffs were in better locations. I had to pull one of those plastic supports off an old mobo to support the top right corner. It would have been nice if two of these had been included since there are two holes that you can't screw down. I can't seem to find a way to disable USB standby mode which means that my speakers which are USB powered stay on all the time. Overall it's a great motherboard and works for what I needed.

Pros: Board has a lot of nice features. I like the layout of the new BIOS.

Cons: Board is dead. Only got into the BIOS 1/20 boots. Tested with two other known good boards with the same parts.

8gb G.SKILL Ripjaws 1600
AMD Phenom II 955
PNY GTX560
Seagate 1TB 7200 Sata 6gb/s
Corsair 750 Watt PSU

Pros: Low price

Cons: Technically, this board supports up to 64GB of RAM, but currently there is NO compatible memory available. Here is the final reply I got from Biostar tech support (which BTW is only available via email, with about 1 day turn-around):

"At this moment there are no available 64 gig 4x16gb modules in market. We were only able to test a borrowed sample but had to return."

Long story short, only non-ECC, non-registered memory is supported by this board. After spending several days and realizing I can only populate this board with up to 32GB, I sent it back in favor of a much higher-quality board from a different manufacturer.

Pros: You would be hard pressed to beat the way this board works. At 54.00 it's not like a high end board however this thing runs very well with the older X6 processor. Plays all games, boots fast.runs cool. Fired right up at post ( don't know about all these other peoples problems) Loaded Win 7 in about 15 minutes and am using mostly borderline old stuff. For once in 15 years of doing computers I'm happy with a board I bought for myself. I got it 1 day ahead of schedule ( great job New Egg)

Cons: No IDE channel. Didn't notice that in the specs so you need a sata optical drive.

Other Thoughts: Excellent bargain for what you get but not a lot of gadgets and extras.

Pros: Great board, stable
accepts a FX-8350 out of the box

Cons: None, it makes my wife's computer better than my own.

Other Thoughts: None really, I ended up getting this for my wife's computer to do some video editing work. The price is good and it has all the features that we needed from it. With a good price point, I'm considering it for my file server build.

Pros: no driver issues yet in W7
USB3 + SATA3 on an AM3+ board under $75

Cons: n/a

Other Thoughts: unlocked 2 cores on my phenom ii x2 550

Pros: it works, even tho it took me 4 different video cards ( first was a best*** xfx "one" spare card fanless just in case I needed another hdmi card for my media center in the living room, well apparently that's junk go figure, try one out of main computer but was a GeForce gave me beep warnings so I was like well no, tried another card that I had laying around and found that's dead too, finally, went downstairs grabed my old 4000 series card out of the media center in the basement and plugged it in, well windows 7 is installed and everything is running just peachy... gunna order that videocard today after all.

Cons: wish they had a option to maybe correct or edit a existing review on newegg.

Other Thoughts: was totally my fault, well that and the video cards I had laying around I guess. but now its running and I couldn't be happier, now lets just hope it lasts :)(

Pros: nice looking, USB 3.0 SATA 6 HD audio for my BR's

Cons: never got any video out of this board, id get the 1 beep for post, checked the jumpers tried 2 different ones tried 2 video cards, tried a total teardown / rebuild, power is good video cards both worked, made sure ram was seated and reseated, second time around I even got my cable management to look nicer :) but still no video nada nothing :( checked the monitors made sure good connections there used 2 different ones, I don't know how more thorough I could be.

anyways I guess I should have stayed away, I have built a system for my sis using this brand but she didn't use that for long before she got a laptop, so no idea how long that lasted, this MB didn't even take flight, just spinning the fans and made the HD light flicker.

worst thing is this was a build in progress, as I saved up bit by bit to buy parts, so this MB is past the RMA so I suppose its warranty time :( hope bio-star has decent support to resolve this.

my build currently on hold...
AMD 8350
16 gig (8x2) Kingston 1600 vengeance
Cool master s524 cooler
Samsung 120 SSD
this none working MB
and either a sapphire 7850 OC 2 gig or the MSI twin 7850 2 gig, I planned to decide next check and buy it, but looks like that's on hold.

I might just bite the bullet and buy a different brand, looks like there's a lot of post about issues with this board as it is, I will try the warranty, but will save it for a media center build, and buy something a bit better for this build.

Other Thoughts: it has a great layout, really, if it worked id love it cause cable management was rather simple.

Pros: It worked great when I got it. The settings under the bios are quite helpful and plentiful. As a gamer you're able to tweek your machine just the way you want it.

Cons: Now I'm not sure what exactly came first, either my graphics card or my motherboard. But the two were related. My graphics card was working fine for since December 2, 2012 when I received it in the mail. I was testing it on my older computer. Around march 18th is when I received my new computer in the mail.

Two days ago April 30th 2013 is when my graphics card blew out. That was the most noticeable thing. After which I've trouble shot and plugged a known working graphics card into my machine. It now crashes on the Bios sometimes, and will not boot windows, nor will it attempt to reformat from a CD. Again I'm not sure which one caused this. However, I had no problems with my graphics card until now.

Also my powersupply seems to be running normal, I've tested the Voltage/AC/DC on the connectors, and they are running smoothly. Usually when a powersupply goes out, it's extremely noticeable.

Other Thoughts: Overall it is a great motherboard. Like all things though there are some bad apples in a patch. I am willing to give this board another try.