Biostar extended its Racing series of motherboards with the Biostar Racing B150GTN, which is a gaming-oriented mini-ITX board. Probably the most attractive aspect of this board to many gamers will be its special LED lighting features.
To give the motherboard an extra aesthetic touch, Biostar embedded RGB LED lights inside of the board’s two heatsinks. These lights are controlled with the company’s Vivid LED DJ software, which allows users to create custom lighting effects. The software can also control additional lights connected to the board via a 5050 LED connector.
Although it uses the business-oriented B150 chipset, this board has many features we would typically expect to see on a more expensive Z170 motherboard, such as U.2 support. Biostar also installed an M.2 Key M slot on the board, but it’s located on the bottom of the PCB. This will make it more difficult to add or upgrade an M.2 SSD, as users will need to remove the board from the case to do so. Because there is insufficient space to fit it on the front of the PCB, however, placing it on the bottom of the board is better than not having one at all.
The Biostar Racing B150GTN has a mid-range audio subsystem powered by a Realtek ALC892 codec. Biostar isolated most of the audio hardware on a segmented piece of PCB, but one side of the codec is connected to the main portion of PCB beside the PCI-E x16 slot. This is likely to make the audio subsystem less expensive to produce, as the codec can pull power directly from the rest of the system, and it doesn’t need additional hardware to transfer power from one piece of the PCB to another. This will likely increase the amount noise heard in audio playback, but as users often use alternative audio technologies such as HDMI and SPDIF nowadays, it likely won’t bother most people.
Currently there is no word on pricing or availability for Biostar’s Racing B150GTN.
| Biostar Racing B150GTN | |
|---|---|
| CPU Support | Skylake LGA1151 Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 |
| Chipset | B150 |
| PCI-E | PCi-E 3.0 X16 |
| Storage Connections | U.2 (32 Gbps)
M.2 Key M (32 Gbps) 4 x SATA-III (6 Gbps) |
| Memory Support | 2 x DDR4 2133 MHz (Max Total Capacity32 GB) |
| Audio | Realtek ALC892 |
| NIC | Intel i219V |
