The Board - Layout

The Biostar TA990FXE comes in what is now a standard color scheme for the majority of Biostar motherboards; red heatsinks and slots nicely contrast with the black PCB and the remaining few slots in white, which match up with AMD's own product coloring quite well. The layout is clean and simple, with very few distractions, both on the front and the back of the board. The back of the board is populated with several areas with MOSFET cooling strips, and there are quite a few protruding pins here and there, but overall the layout is very simple, and we did not notice anything that might interfere with mounting aftermarket cooling.


The socket area is fairly open, with very few surface-mounted components close to the socket, but we do find an older-style cooler-mounting bracket that may impede airflow across the board, unlike AMD's new cooler retention clips, which feature two smaller parts of high-density plastic. The socket itself, of course, is the new black "AM3b" socket that ensures support for the now released AMD AM3+ FX CPUs, which features slightly larger holes for the pins to drop into, but at the same time, provides a very secure grip on pre-existing CPUs. You can see that the socket itself is provided by LOTES, and its black color is part of what you want to look for to ensure that AM3+ CPU support. The back of the socket area, as we mentioned earlier, does have several MOSFET cooling strips and protruding pins nearby, however, our usual test fitting of a Corsair H50 backplate proved to show no problems in clearance with this design, and we were very happy to note that the backplate is reinforced for rigidity with two small metal strips on each side.


The bottom half of the motherboard is filled with just six expansion slots; three PCIe 2.0 x16 slots (electrically two x16 slots and one x4 slot.) two PCI slots, and one PCIe 2.0 x1 slot. The Biostar TA990FXE features four DIMM slots for up to 32 GB of memory (4x 8 GB), with a single phase power delivery system for the DIMMs. This provides a great contrast to some other entry-level boards, most of which feature a single-phase power delivery system for the installed memory. We were quite eager to see how much of a role this may play when clocking RAM to the limit.


The board's bottom edge carries a full complement of pin headers for everything; from front panel audio to front panel USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 as well as FireWire. On the south bridge side of the board, we find several USB headers, a Clear CMOS header, and right below we find the onboard ON/OFF and RESET switches. We also find a serial COM port as well as a fan header, and the front panel pin block. There are a total of three fan headers on the TA990FXE, with only the CPU_FAN header supporting PWM control, while the remaining two are both the standard 3-pin type with RPM sense.


On the back plate we find a combo PS/2 mouse and keyboard port, one eSATA, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a six-port analogue audio panel, a digital optical port and a coaxial audio port, with a LAN port and a FireWire port rounding everything out. A total of five SATA 6 Gb/s ports are found on the opposite side, with all five internal ports as well as the eSATA port driven by the SB950 chipset.