Biostar TA785GE 128M: BIOS And Overclocking
A list of voltage and frequency ranges can be found on page 21 of this review.
Biostar's TA785GE had solid control over the most important configurable settings. The two conspicuous absences were a PCIe clock adjustment (something I personally wouldn't miss) and the CPU multiplier (this is a big one for enthusiasts, especially owners of Black Edition CPUs). There is a BIOS settings profile that can be saved, which is nice.
The board boasts DDR2-1066 compatibility, and would indeed boot at this setting using our ADATA 800+ MHz-rated RAM, but it wouldn't complete a 3DMark run at this setting. Admittedly, the RAM was running at an overclocked signaling rate, but we did manage to get it to pass a 3DMark run on the Foxconn motherboard at 1,066 MHz.
Turning on AMD's ACC feature would unfortunately crash the system with both our Phenom II X2 550 and Phenom II X3 705e CPU samples. The strange part is that the 705e’s fourth CPU core can be unlocked on other boards.
Interestingly, the Biostar TA785GE 128M was only one of two products in our roundup that would accept a SidePort memory overclock. We were able to push the SidePort memory to 1,066 MHz from the 1,000 MHz default clock. This is not a game-changing accomplishment, but it's notable among most of the competing boards that would immediately display screen corruption with the slightest SidePort tweak.
The integrated graphics didn't disappoint, with a stable 900 MHz overclock when the northbridge voltage was upped to 1.35 V in the BIOS. That's 400 MHz faster than the 500 MHz stock speed.
