Biostar TH55XE review

We’ve been impressed by the increasingly low prices of LGA1156 motherboards. At just £67, Biostar’s TH55XE could easily be paired with an inexpensive Core i3 or i5 processor to build a powerful low-cost computer.

It lacks the latest features, such as USB3 and SATA III, but is fairly well equipped with expansion slots, with two PCI and one PCI-E x4 in addition to the usual PCI-E x16 slot – double-height cards will block the PCI-E x4 slot below, though. It’s generally well laid out and easy to build on, though. There are five SATA II connectors and the IDE connector. Between them, four memory slots can take a maximum of 16GB of overclocked DDR3 RAM rated up to 2,000MHz.

There are just four USB ports on the back, along with FireWire and eSATA ports. There are three USB headers on the board, plus a FireWire header, along with the usual, largely redundant, serial header and a rare parallel header.

Two PS/2 connectors on the backplane allow you to spare a couple of USB ports if you use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse. The motherboard can output graphics provided by your Intel processor via DVI, VGA and HDMI. There are also 7.1 analogue stereo outputs and an optical S/PDIF.

Scant USB ports notwithstanding, theTH55XE has a decent range of features and its low price is certainly appealing. Unfortunately, the motherboard’s performance in our benchmark tests weren’t as impressive as we’d hoped for. Our Budget Buy winner, Gigabyte’s GA-H55-S2, is a bargain LGA1156 motherboard with high-end performance to boot – it’s much better value for money.