BIOSTAR Introduces Its New Z890 Valkyrie Motherboard

[Nomad76]

BIOSTAR, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards, IPC solutions, and storage devices, today unveils the all-new Z890 VALKYRIE flagship motherboard built to empower next-generation AI enthusiasts.

Designed to harness the full power of Intel Core Ultra processors (series 2), the Z890 VALKYRIE is tailor-made for high-performance gaming, content creation, and advanced AI applications. The Intel Core Ultra processors offers unparalleled AI capabilities, delivering exceptional speed and multi-core performance. When paired with BIOSTAR's flagship Z890 VALKYRIE motherboard, this combination becomes the ultimate platform for creators and tech enthusiasts to explore the world of generative AI without needing a dedicated graphics card. From image generation to real-time data processing, the Z890 VALKYRIE provides speed and efficiency with limitless possibilities.



Built around the powerful Intel Z890 chipset, the Z890 VALKYRIE is tuned to support up to 8000+(OC) MHz of blazing-fast DDR5 memory across 4 DIMM slots, delivering an unmatched performance boost for gaming and AI applications. It boasts three PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, perfect for the latest cutting-edge graphics cards and is ideal for immersive gaming and advanced content creation. With its innovative EZ-release design, users can effortless remove the graphics card with just one click. Furthermore, the Z890 offers four SATA III, one PCIe 5.0 M.2, and five PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, ensuring lightning-fast data access and superior expansion capability.

The VALKYRIE Z890 is equipped with a comprehensive rear I/O panel designed for exceptional connectivity and performance. It boasts a USB 4.0 Type-C port and nine USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, providing seamless connectivity options for all your high-speed devices. It includes two HDMI 2.1 ports and a DisplayPort 2.1 for breathtaking visuals, delivering stunning image quality. Combined with its 7.1 channel high-definition audio, powered by the Realtek ALC 1220 codec, the VALKYRIE transforms any setup into a true entertainment powerhouse. Networking is equally top-tier, featuring integrated 5 GbE and 2.5 GbE LAN, along with support for WiFi 7 (WiFi 7 card not included), ensuring ultra-fast, reliable internet access for smooth gaming and content creation.

With its advanced architecture and cutting-edge features, the Z890 VALKYRIE is ready to meet the demands of next-gen gaming and AI applications. It delivers a seamless blend of power, speed, and connectivity, making it the ultimate tool for pro gamers, content creators, and AI enthusiasts looking to elevate their workflow.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source

 

[Chaitanya]

Even Biostar has decent PCIe layout compared to "Tier 1" makers.

 

[Vincero]

An actual independent non-USB-C derived DisplayPort connector...

 

[wNotyarD]

6 M.2 slots? How?

I can easily see how to allocate 5 of them. Where is the sixth?

 

[Vincero]

6 M.2 slots? How?

Maybe they are also counting the Wifi M.2 slot in that number - it doesn't list that they are all x4 lane slots...

 

[wNotyarD]

Maybe they are also counting the Wifi M.2 slot in that number - it doesn't list that they are all x4 lane slots...

Not in this news article, no, but in their website it explicitly mentions the 1x 5.0 and 5x 4.0 M.2, with the WiFi slot on its own.

 

[chrcoluk]

Three PCIE gen 5 x16 slots? what kind of description is that. Marketing has levelled up in dishonesty.

 

[TheLostSwede]

An actual independent non-USB-C derived DisplayPort connector...

DP 2.1 at that, better than most graphics cards.

Even Biostar has decent PCIe layout compared to "Tier 1" makers.

Only if you're ok with x8x4x4...

Three PCIE gen 5 x16 slots? what kind of description is that. Marketing has levelled up in dishonesty.

No, it's as per above, x8x4x4, all from the CPU.

 

[wNotyarD]

Three PCIE gen 5 x16 slots? what kind of description is that. Marketing has levelled up in dishonesty.

They're physically x16. Electrically, though...

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Strange, rumours that core ultra 200 support all DDR5 speeds up to 6400 native...and then in this motherboard specs saw that native support is up to DDR5 5600?!?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Strange, rumours that core ultra 200 support all DDR5 speeds up to 6400 native...and then in this motherboard specs saw that native support is up to DDR5 5600?!?

Keep in mind that it's the PR/marketing and web teams prepping the product pages. Loads of errors across all the brands. Gigabyte put PCIe 3.0 on loads of products, when the chipset is all PCIe 4.0.

 

[Vincero]

I love seeing Biostar motherboard releases - it reminds of what things would be like at the bottom end of the PC market if ECS and PC-Chips still were about peddling their wares...

 

[Chaitanya]

Only if you're ok with x8x4x4...

there are high speed NICs with additional M.2 slot so that x8x4x4 is quite useful way to add both a fast network capability with additional controllers via M.2 slot.

 

[chrcoluk]

DP 2.1 at that, better than most graphics cards.


Only if you're ok with x8x4x4...


No, it's as per above, x8x4x4, all from the CPU.

Just checked spec page for my board they are labelled as all x16 in headline so I guess I am remembering wrong here, seems to be standard practice.

So no lanes used from chipset on PCIe slots.

 

[TheLostSwede]

I love seeing Biostar motherboard releases - it reminds of what things would be like at the bottom end of the PC market if ECS and PC-Chips still were about peddling their wares...

PC-Chips was so much worse than anything else in the market, I mean, they had their own weird chipsets at times and the quality was just...
ECS tried getting back into making "gamer" motherboards a couple of years ago, I guess it failed. They split the company up in two different business units in 2023 I believe, so now there's ECS and ECSIPC.
Looks like they still made a Z790 gamer mothreboard.

https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Motherboard/Z790H7-A/overview

They even have a gaming PC...

https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/GAMING-PC/LEET_B660/overview

 

[Vincero]

PC-Chips was so much worse than anything else in the market, I mean, they had their own weird chipsets at times and the quality was just...

They would source whatever they could... OPTI, VIA, SiS... sometimes the thinking behind the boards wasn't bad but the execution (usually at BIOS level) was terrible and back then firmware updates were hard enough to come by which meant if it was buggy it was a permanent 'feature'.
I can't blame them I guess... there was a demand for bottom of the barrel and they cashed in... At least with Biostar you did/do actually get some sort of support.

EDIT: You know what really pissed me off back in the day was that I'd be seeing Gigabyte, Asus, etc., motherboards with bad caps and not once did I ever see one of these el-cheapo-bastardo PC-chips boards with them...

ECS tried getting back into making "gamer" motherboards a couple of years ago, I guess it failed. They split the company up in two different business units in 2023 I believe, so now there's ECS and ECSIPC.

Yeah I believe they decided that, like Asus/Gigabyte/Asrock/MSI/etc., they'd go after that sweet sweet server environment money with a proper server business unit rather than fighting for low-end consumer scraps... and now who knows what they are doing.

Looks like they still made a Z790 gamer mothreboard.

https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/Motherboard/Z790H7-A/overview

They even have a gaming PC...

https://www.ecs.com.tw/en/Product/GAMING-PC/LEET_B660/overview

To be fair, I've seen worse.

 

[TheLostSwede]

They would source whatever they could... OPTI, VIA, SiS... sometimes the thinking behind the boards wasn't bad but the execution (usually at BIOS level) was terrible and back then firmware updates were hard enough to come by which meant if it was buggy it was a permanent 'feature'.
I can't blame them I guess... there was a demand for bottom of the barrel and they cashed in... At least with Biostar you did/do actually get some sort of support.

You forgot Ali, which are oddly enough still going.

揚智科技 ALi Tech - Home

www.alitech.com

I was working in a computer shop pre Y2K that used a lot of PC Chips boards in their cheap systems and as I said, quality wasn't a word you can use to describe their motherboards.

EDIT: You know what really pissed me off back in the day was that I'd be seeing Gigabyte, Asus, etc., motherboards with bad caps and not once did I ever see one of these el-cheapo-bastardo PC-chips boards with them...

There's a very long story behind that and the main reason was that the cap maker in question, had done some industrial espionage and gotten an incomplete "recipe" for how to make caps from a Japanese competitor and they clearly weren't competent enough to figure that out. Pretty much all of the Taiwanese board makers used caps from that company, as they were cheaper than the Japanese ones, but still not super cheap.
PC Chips, being "too cheap" to go with something that high quality, clearly got away from having issues.

Yeah I believe they decided that, like Asus/Gigabyte/Asrock/MSI/etc., they'd go after that sweet sweet server environment money with a proper server business unit rather than fighting for low-end consumer scraps... and now who knows what they are doing.

Nah, they went after the embedded systems and micro PC market, they've done a ton of really tiny PCs, smaller than the NUC sized stuff.
They've also made a bunch of laptops and all kind of other random stuff. I did a project with them almost a decade ago and initially the company I worked for got a basic consumer Atom based board from them for a pretty attractive price point, but then one day, ECS informed us that they were going all embedded and they were going to triple the price for the same board...

To be fair, I've seen worse.

So have I, but why do they have one product only?

 

[Vincero]

You forgot Ali, which are oddly enough still going.

Can't remember seeing a PC-Chips ALi motherboard (although not saying they didn't exist)... but yeah I overlooked them... not surprised the company is still going - Nvidia only bought out the chipset business from them (before killing it rather than maybe selling it / spinning it off).

There's a very long story behind that and the main reason was that the cap maker in question, had done some industrial espionage and gotten an incomplete "recipe" for how to make caps from a Japanese competitor and they clearly weren't competent enough to figure that out. Pretty much all of the Taiwanese board makers used caps from that company, as they were cheaper than the Japanese ones, but still not super cheap.
PC Chips, being "too cheap" to go with something that high quality, clearly got away from having issues.

Yeah, the espionage story is still kind of ridiculous which clearly also showed said company being too cheap to properly develop product was also too cheap to properly test products to failure.
Yes, nothing exotic on their PCBs apart from their IC selection.

Nah, they went after the embedded systems and micro PC market, they've done a ton of really tiny PCs, smaller than the NUC sized stuff.

Fair enough - remembering from back in the day (which is a while ago now) they did a release basically saying they were looking to move away from consumer motherboard space, and servers and industrial/embedded was things they mentioned. I'm guessing enough techs working in the server space were like "if I see an 'ECS' or 'Elitegroup' branded product, then no".

They've also made a bunch of laptops and all kind of other random stuff. I did a project with them almost a decade ago and initially the company I worked for got a basic consumer Atom based board from them for a pretty attractive price point, but then one day, ECS informed us that they were going all embedded and they were going to triple the price for the same board...

Sometimes some people just don't want the business.... maybe the expense of keeping a particular line item in production which doesn't generate any profit has to be passed on somewhere.

So have I, but why do they have one product only?

They've released other boards very infrequently... maybe it's part of their pre-built offerings or they are supplying them to kit / bundle resellers in some areas - I guess locally (in Asia) they probably still maintain some support presence in some countries and maybe have a customer base.
To that end, I wondered if Maxsun would try properly entering into the western markets since they bought the Soyo brand (even though after all this time it would have little recognition - same as if they resurrected 'Abit') but doesn't seem so.

 

[TheLostSwede]

To that end, I wondered if Maxsun would try properly entering into the western markets since they bought the Soyo brand (even though after all this time it would have little recognition - same as if they resurrected 'Abit') but doesn't seem so.

Abit was resurrected as ABIT or abit at one point, it was just awful and failed within a year or two.

 

[Vincero]

Abit was resurrected as ABIT or abit at one point, it was just awful and failed within a year or two.

Eh... As I see it ABIT never went away to be 'resurrected' as such - kinda like OCZ they got bought, had a bit of a restructure and then sort of carried on (although OCZ did literally go to the wall whereas ABIT never got that bad... neither actually actually shut up) until they really got shut down by new owner.

If I remember right, before they even got bought they were loosing talent (no doubt aware of the state of the company).

I liked ABIT (was a shame when bad caps put my KT7A to rest) but once fine grained frequency control became prevalent as a basic feature on most motherboards by most brands, they had less appeal as they neither offered better value for money and sometimes still had the same 'edgey' stability issues compared to the MSI's, etc.
Kinda like Asrock in the early days but even they now offer generally rock solid products (maybe sometimes after a BIOS update or two in some edge case products - old habits).

I guess, on the face of it, Biostar have done pretty well just chipping away at the low end and picking up the feature bloat as it becomes standard in firmware and component capabilities - overclocking, RGB, lots of M.2 slots... It just trickles down. They are literally the winners of the lowest-tier motherboard company options.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Eh... As I see it ABIT never went away to be 'resurrected' as such - kinda like OCZ they got bought, had a bit of a restructure and then sort of carried on (although OCZ did literally go to the wall whereas ABIT never actually shut up) until they really got shut down by new owner.

If I remember right, before they even got bought they were loosing talent (no doubt aware of the state of the company).

I liked ABIT (was a shame when bad caps put my KT7A to rest) but once fine grained frequency control became prevalent as a basic feature on most motherboards by most brands, they had less appeal as they neither offered better value for money and sometimes still had the same 'edgey' stability issues compared to the MSI's, etc.
Kinda like Asrock in the early days but even they now offer generally rock solid products (maybe sometimes after a BIOS update or two in some edge case products - old habits).

I don't know the full story, but part of it involves one of the owners of Abit taking a significant chunk of the cash and doing a runner, for what reason, I know not.
That lead to people not getting paid and leaving the company, although some where also laid off without a severance package. On top of that, there was apparently some other dodgy things going on if you have a look at Wikipedia, plus they lost their most famous engineer to DFI.

You're right that Abit never officially went bust, but it was USI that went in with money and the name changed to Universal abit. Less than three years later the company was dead.

I was on very good terms with their sales guy in the UK when I worked for PCW (not PCWorld from the US) and he would often come around and show me upcoming products early. The motherboard makers I miss the most, largely due to the great people there, are Abit, AOpen (they're obviously still around as a company, but the people left), Albatron (even if they never really mattered) and oddly enough, Chaintech, who had a brief period of a couple of years when they made some really great boards. For some reason, most of the people were either Dutch of Taiwanese. I worked a brief stint for MSI in the UK, but the Taiwanese management there sucked...

 

[Vincero]

Chaintech started making PC motherboards again a while ago... not that you'd hear about it as they seem to be Asia focussed.

AOpen was weird - they just sort of stopped bothering.... motherboards, PSUs, Cases, and complete systems... it's like they just gave up, and each product line phased out eventually at different times. Almost EVGA style although maybe over a longer period.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Strange, rumours that core ultra 200 support all DDR5 speeds up to 6400 native...and then in this motherboard specs saw that native support is up to DDR5 5600?!?

Isn't 6400 CUDIMM only on 1DPC MB's? 5600 on UDIMM?