Board Layout

The Biostar A10N-8800E itself has a retro feel with a gloss black PCB and bright yellow expansion slots. The CPU socket is nearly dead center with a tiny little pre-mounted heatsink and fan. The back of the board is a uniform gloss black.


The CPU cooler is held in place with four small plastic pins as well as adhesive thermal paste.


The CPU socket is quite small, which is good considering the compact size of Mini ITX boards. There is a single 4-pin CPU power connector, awkwardly placed to the left of the CPU socket, while the two DIMM slots sit above the socket.


The Biostar A10N-8800E has a single PCIe 3.0 X16 slot at the very bottom of the board, with the 16 Gb/s M.2 Key M connector just above it. On the right, just below the 24 pin power connector, are two vertically orientated SATA 6 Gb/s ports.


The rear I/O on the Biostar A10N-8800E is pretty sparsely populated. I would have liked to see at least two more USB ports, even if just USB 2.0.

The full list includes:

• 1x PS/2 keyboard connector
• 1x PS/2 mouse connector
• 2x USB 2.0 Type-A ports
• 2x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports
• 1x RJ-45 LAN ports
• 1x HDMI 1.4
• 1x VGA Port
• 3x 3.5 mm audio jacks

LAN on the Biostar A10N-8800E is handled by a Realtek RTL8111H controller.