Otherness everywhere you look – Biostar B660GTA (review)

Biostar B660GTA in detail

Most motherboards from the same classes look pretty much the same. While they differ in color scheme and heatsink shape, the layout, features, and overall operation (including power management) are like a carbon copy. The Biostar B660GTA goes upstream in many ways and presents an attractive option for those users who always find something lacking on boards in this price range.

Biostar is behind the top three (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) and ASRock is the fifth largest motherboard manufacturer. For the past years, the company’s offerings were characterized by a more modest selection of models, but this has grown and with the Intel B660 chipset alone, Biostar has as many as nine motherboards – from the very low-end to more robust options that can withstand the high power draw of even the most powerful Alder Lake processors in boost. For this test, we’ll take an in-depth look at the Biostar B660GTA with the most feature-rich options.


Biostar B660GTA

Although this is Biostar’s most expensive board with the B660 chipset, it is still “grounded”. The features don’t include extra things for enthusiasts, which tend to increase the price significantly. Price-wise, the B660GTA from the Racing series is on par with the cheaper Z690 boards.

The format is ATX, i.e. 305 × 244 mm. The PCB with a regular shape is also traditional. Unusual or above-standard is the distance between the processor socket and the first PCI Express slot. The center distance (of both sockets) is up to 101 mm, which is 11 mm more than on the Gigabyte B660 Aorus Master DDR4 board. The greater the spacing here, the more convenient it is to remove the graphics card alongside a large tower cooler. From the centre of the CPU socket to the contacts of the first DIMM slot, it is a standard 56 mm (you can easily calculate whether the cooler will collide with the RAM heatsinks and in which positions). DDR4 memory is supported and space for four modules is available.

The heatsinks are robust, more robust than on the cheaper B660 boards. One of the VRM heatsinks even consists of thin “slice” fins, as you can see in the title photo. The radiating area is thus considerably larger than on most other boards, which admittedly use a lot of material, but with poorer segmentation. However, the effectiveness of this heatsink is somewhat unnecessarily killed by Biostar’s rear wall (cover?), which prevents airflow through the fins.
The weight of this heatsink is 84 g, the second (larger) one has 169 g.

The SSD M.2 heatsinks also have a high weight. They are for all three slots and the largest, the bottom one, is up to 59 g. This is despite the fact that this M.2 slot, compared to the other two (PCIe 4.0 ×4), supports a half-speed interface (PCIe 3.0 ×4), which naturally makes lower demands on cooling as well. However, it is longer than the other heatsinks mainly because this slot is also the only one that supports SSD formats up to 110 mm in length. The other two max out at 80 mm and are reserved for NVMe SSDs. The third slot is a hybrid, it supports SATA in addition to PCIe.

Mounting an M.2 SSD is rather impractical. Fixing the SSDs themselves in the slots uses small screws (some boards already use more elegant locking levers), but also their heatsinks. Other manufacturers have had a lock in place on the heatsink level for a long time so that the screws can’t be lost. When that happens, you can’t just get replacements at the hardware store.

   

Storage support is above standard, especially for up to eight SATA connectors for SSD/HDD inch formats. The board is thus offered for server building. RAIDs supported are 0, 1, 5 and 10. But count on the fact that one SATA connector shares a line with a third M.2 connector. This means that if you install a SATA SSD in this slot (M.2), the eighth SATA connector will be disabled. If you want to use all the M.2 and SATA connectors, you have to install a PCIe (NVMe) SSD in the bottom M.2 connector. Somewhere Biostar giveth, somewhere else Biostar taketh. There are only five fan connectors, which is unusually few for an ATX board.

Atypical, and now with a positive connotation, is also the selection of external connectors. From the iGPU, besides HDMI (2.0/2.1) and DisplayPort 1.4, there is also a DVI-D output. Then there’s also a PS/2 for connecting a keyboard and mouse. In a typical server environment, this connectivity will find its use. The board will also be able to connect directly to older monitors that are still in use in this environment. PS/2 will again come in handy when typically outside of the OS the faster USB ports don’t work without a driver. Most of the USB ports are Gen. 2 standard 3.2, i.e. with 10 Gbps bandwidth. The Ethernet connector (RJ-45) is a single 2.5 Gb, there are also two SMA connectors on the rear panel to which the antennas are connected, but the RF module itself is no longer supplied with the board. You have to buy it separately.

It is rather strange that in this price range only three 3.5 mm jacks (without optical output) are provided. But we won’t criticize this too much, because behind the design it’s clear that Biostar has prioritized quality over quantity. You won’t be able to connect 5.1 and 7.1 systems with multiple satellites to the board, but the connectors that are there are proper – gold-plated. The audio adapter on the board is Realtek ALC1220.

Finally the VRM. This is 17-phase (with a current capacity per phase of 70 A), built on Renessas RAA228228 PWM drivers and OnSemi FDMF5062 voltage regulators. The power delivery is therefore quite robust. What is its efficiency, you will find out from the tests.

   

There are also RGB LED elements on the board in two places. On the plastic cover next to the VRM – their lightguides are in the photo below. Then the chipset heatsink is also backlit, but this is in the axis of the first PCI Express slot and will often be overlapped by the graphics card.

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