Biostar's B250 Motherboards Join The Race

Biostar announced the Racing B250GT5 and Racing B250GT3 motherboards as part of its "Racing" series. Similar to the company’s higher-end Z270 Racing boards, the new B250 Racing motherboards have RGB LED lights and 5050 LED headers.

Both motherboards have two of the 5050 LED headers that will allow you to connect an LED light strip to each one. Biostar’s Vivid LED DJ software is bundled with both boards and will allow you to customize the lighting effects and color.

Based on Intel’s B250 chipset, these motherboards have a significant advantage in terms of connectivity support over their B150 predecessors. This is due to B250's seven additional HSIO lanes and four more PCI-E lanes relative to B150.

Biostar took advantage of these additional PCI-E lanes to connect an M.2 Key M slot with Intel Optane support on both of its new B250 motherboards. It was also able to configure six SATA-III ports, a SATA M.2 Key M slot, and two PCI-E x1 3.0 slots. As the Racing B250GT5 is the higher-end of the two boards, it also has two PCI slots and a USB 3.0 Type-C port.

The Racing B250GT5 also has a higher-end Realtek ALC892 audio codec, whereas the Racing B250GT3 has an older Realtek ALC887 codec. Both boards also feature EMI shielding and high-end audio capacitors to improve the performance of the audio codec that should reduce noise and improve clarity.

Another advantage of the new B250 chipset is support for DDR4 RAM clocked at up to 2,400MHz. Although these boards don’t support overclocking, Biostar equipped both with two BIOSes to protect against a BIOS failure.

Biostar didn’t say when these boards would be available, but it revealed pricing information for both. The Biostar Racing B250GT5 has an MSRP of $109 and comes bundled with a Biostar Vivid LED fan. The lower-end Biostar Racing B250GT3 doesn’t feature a fan, but it costs $79.