Concluding thoughts
Biostar has managed to extract hither-to unseen performance from both the NVIDIA nForce3 150 and VIA K8T800 chipsets. That's helped in no small measure by Biostar allowing the user to access memory latencies on both board's BIOSes. Performance is undoubtedly the most striking factor here. Our benchmarks often showed a potent 3.2GHz Pentium4 / i875P combination struggling against the either Biostar board and the impressive Athlon 64 3200+ CPU. We'll briefly discuss each board's failings and successes before wrapping it up.
The Biostar K8VHA Pro is a recipient of VIA K8T800 chipset. It uses two discrete bridges that are connected via VIA's V-link. The Northbridge then connects to AMD's CPU via a full-speed HyperTransport link. The layout was generally good. Storage and power ports were located together and there was plenty of room around the CPU socket. One of the board's strengths is in the use of the VIA VT8237 Southbridge. It provides on-chip SATA that can be extended to cover 4 drives. Biostar keeps to the standard 2.
We also like the coloured case-to-motherboard pins. It's small touches like these that shows the manufacturer paying attention to detail. Features are further boosted via discrete controllers for FireWire (VIA VT6307) and Gigabit LAN (Realtek RTL8110S-32). There's a couple of things we'd change. For one, we'd remove the first PCI slot. It's all but redundant with an AGP card in place. We'd also like a more comprehensive BIOS, voltage adjustment, and a far better manual. There's a lot of good in this package that's blemished by not seeing the job through on all counts. It's extremely fast at default speeds but doesn't offer much to entice the enthusiast.
The Biostar K8NHA Pro represents a deviation from the K8VHA Pro's design. The power ports are moved down the board; we don't really appreciate their revised positioning. They can get in the way of the CPU fan's airflow. The nForce3 150 is a single-chip design. With so much being crammed into one package, something has to go. There's no on-chip SATA or APU. VIA's VT6420 controller provides decent SATA support, though. This board also appears to be bereft of the complete Biostar feature set. There's a number of instances where possible features are silkscreened. One such case is Wi-Fi support. Features like that are needed to set boards apart these days. It also suffers from the unusable first PCI slot problem as the K8VHA Pro. The K8NHA Pro features Realtek's new ALC655 sound CODEC. It's one step down from the incumbent ALC650, so we were expecting the better-performing ALC658. It does score one over its counterpart by having a better BIOS. Again, the bundle could have been a little more substantial.
Two boards that highlight the power of the Athlon 64 3200+ to the fullest. Both are extremely fast and carry a reasonable feature set. Yet we feel as if both could be improved markedly with a little more thought for the BIOS, feature set and bundle. If it's raw power that you hanker for, both boards have it in spades.
- Biostar K8NHA Pro
- Biostar K8VHA Pro
