BIOSTAR TA880GB+ AM3 AMD 880G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Awesome features, Good compatibility, can't complain! Integrated graphics score 4.2 (aero) and 5.5 (gaming) w/ 256MB Shared! Impressed for a "budget board". DDR3, AM3! For clear panel cases there are lots of on-board LEDs kind of neat looking but not a selling point.

Cons: Only gripe would be for you old school users... there is no PS/2 Input for Mouse, there is one for the keyboard though... I used both USB and had no problems.

Overall Review: Purchased for a customer looking to build a budget sytem and they are happy! Was 100% compatible with the Mushkin Enhanced DDR3 6GB I installed on it. Not my brand of choice but quality product to say the least!

Pros: Great value Like the LED post error system Posted with no serious issues Runs cool Integrated video chip seems fine

Cons: CMOS reset jumper was in the "reset" position out of the box.. Definitely check that. When I powered it up, it had no settings. I found it easiest to "accept defaults" then go back in and change specific stuff rather than to try and manually set it up the first go-round, as you literally have to set EVERYTHING if you do it manually the first go round. Memory wasn't working for me the first time I fired it up. Swapped it to the 3&4 slots, everything was fine.. swapped it back to 1&2 and worked fine. Probably just seated poorly the first time, but worth mentioning. Some have mentioned the "diving board" issue. The lack of the back row of screw holes does make things a little more delicate to plug in, as you have no support under the memory, power, or SATA ports. If that makes you nervous, then that's something to think about.

Overall Review: Nice micro with plenty of memory potential and 6 sata ports. No major issues getting it set up, and it runs stable. No complaints.

Pros: No install or start-up problems. Worked on 1st boot. Video looks good on 42 inch HDTV. This is a nice board for a low cost build.

Cons: You get what you pay for so I have no Cons about this board.

Overall Review: It worked as it should. I kept this build simple for my 77 year old Mom. If she was a big time gamer this would not be the board for her.

Pros: -Supports up to 16GB of DDR3 1600 (requires manual BIOS configuration) -Supports Hybrid Graphics -Gigabit LAN

Cons: -Manual failed to state to use Biostar's display driver in order to enable Hybrid Graphics.

Overall Review: Hybrid Graphics is a neat feature that enables the onboard graphics card to boost the 3D performance of the external one. Unfortunately, it only enhances low-end video cards. The typical 3D performance increase is about 25% at 1600 x 900, and about 65% at 1280 x 720. To enable Hybrid Graphics, you will need an AMD graphics card that supports it (I used a 5450), the proper BIOS configuration, and the drivers provided by Biostar. Within the BIOS, you will need to assign 256MB of RAM to the onboard graphics card, enable Surround View, and then select PCI-GFX0-GPP-IGFX as the VGA boot order. Then boot into Windows and install the display driver provided by Biostar (v8.7). The latest display driver from AMD (v8.8) DID NOT allowed me to enable Hybrid Crossfire. Some thoughts about the Biostar drivers. In order to install the display driver, you will need to do it by installing the chipset drivers. However, DO NOT install the AMD SATA and USB drivers. They are legacy drivers for Windows

Pros: 6 SATA ports and 4 RAM slots in a Micro ATX form factor. At the time of purchase, this was the cheapest AM3 board of any size with that based on a 8xx chipset. SATA controller works with linux software raid with no problems. The drives are clearly the limiting factor in local access.

Cons: When saturating the gigabit ethernet connection I got kernel panics under ubuntu 10.10. I switched to an Intel network card and they stopped. Most people will not have fast enough drives to do this. No supports near the RAM. Expect to have to hold the board from behind. I would rather have a PCI Express x1 slot over a PCI slot.

Overall Review: This is a decently good board for a small NAS, having 6 SATA ports. Many boards at this price point have 4 ports which is not enough for a 4 drive RAID10 array and one spare.

Pros: Installed it and it worked. System's running perfectly fine The bios seemed pretty manageable and easy to use. Changing boot priority seems to be easy.

Cons: None so far.

Overall Review: There isn't an IDE port on the board, which is kind of annoying, but it also encourages me to buy a better CD/DVD drive. And I can't negatize the board for it, since IDE wasn't in the specs.

Pros: Works great so far, absolutely no problems with it. 4 memory slots are nice, good BIOS, game boost thing for integrated graphics (upped to 700 MHz and 512 MB shared), HDMI/DVI/VGA, all the goodies. started up the very first try on my very first build!

Cons: Nothing actually wrong with it by any means, not yet anyway. doesn't have the latest features i suppose, but that's not really a con per se. maybe a little expensive? but i got it for $45 on a sale and it works, so heck, it's probably worth $75 for that anyway.

Overall Review: I did have some trouble with the CD drivers it came with, but I'm running ubuntu 10.10 64bit and assuming that's the problem? tried it with "Wine" but no luck, although i'm a noob with linux so i'm sure it's just me. (it's been just fine without them anyway). Haven't tried OCing or unlocking, but i'm pretty confident it would do just fine. Really great board in my opinion, I'd recommend it for sure. AMD Athlon II X2 250 Antec Earthwatts 430W Kingston 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 (@1066MHz due to CPU) Samsung F3 500GB 7200RPM

Pros: good board, inexpensive. Unlocked 4th core on my athlon II x3 450 with no problems. seems like it has good overclock features but I haven't used them other than core unlocker which was one simple button.

Cons: A couple BSOD, but im not really sure if it is the board, or even how to diagnose them. I ran prime 95 with the fourth core unlocked and ran for 2 hours fine. May be other componenets