I have this motherboard and I was wondering how to overclock. I shows the clock speeds in the bios as 100 mhz and goes up to like 107 mhz. How does this translate to the actual clock speeds?
Depends on the multiplier which is dynamic based on demand? anyway if your boost clock is 3.7ghz then its likely doing a 37x100 to do it, so 37x107 gives 3.957ghz. Simple math and I assume this is how it works with Ryzen.
An honest review and not one you see much at least in all the years I have looked at motherboards as it was a Biostar review. I haven't heard good things about their boards ever and so I have avoided them even when available to me which isn't often at the stores I shop.
Biostar has been more of an OEM supplier over the years as I see it and so their boards have been more tailored towards specific systems, not the mass market overall I think, which makes them "not optimal" for the regular user. But that's just as I followed it, maybe I missed the Biostars over the years because there were not a lot of boards to begin with.
On the board itself... really wondering why they bothered with X370 here, especially since there is a B350 version. B350 and X370 aren't all that different in feature set, the main point being CF/SLI which you can't use at this size anyway... soooo, why? I mean you "could" "technically" "maybe" use a PCIe breakout card or cable to get 2 x8 lanes from the one slot to use CF/SLI, but honestly who would do that on ITX?
In Comparison:
X370 B350
PCIe 3.0 0 0
PCIe 2.0 8 6 unused(?) could attach a SATA controller on it
USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbit/s) 2 2
USB 3.0 6 2 they used 2 (+ internal header)
USB 2.0 6 6 they didn't use that
SATA 6 Gbit/s 4 2 OK 1 point for X370, but 4 drives in mITX?
SATA Express 2 2 or 4 SATA each
SATA-Raid 0/1/10 0/1/10 who cares
Overclocking Y Y not with the power delivery on an ITX anyway
CrossFire / SLI Y / Y Y* / – not easily on mITX
So overall why bother with X370... just drives the price up and they have a unit that doesn't make a lot of sense... On a sidenote, the B350 Version has 4 SATA ports as well, and supposedly they go through the Chipset... but AMD's graphic says that B350 has only 2 SATA connections... probably the SATA Express reconfigured.
Might be the price Biostar would pay for them(the chipsets if not clear) is close enough they might as well supply boards with it for those who just blindly believe that "x370 muh betta best get that one"?
Yeah, really the only thing I can think of too... unfortunately the B350 Version isn't available here (Germany/EU in general) so I can't compare prices, the X370 version is ~120€
But then again... if you can get your hands on both chips at nearly the same price, why bother with B350 then It would just drive up manufacturing and development costs for 2 boards instead of one, no?
Well they help "differentiate" the product lines, except on the bigger boards thanks to the extra space the difference can be made much more obvious, with all the bells and whistles.