Biostar RACING X370GT5 Motherboard Review

Biostar RACING X370GT5 Motherboard Review Conclusion

The latest motherboard to pass through Play3r’s hands is the Biostar RACING X370GT5, a motherboard priced somewhere in the middle of the bunch and offers several features that may make it an ideal motherboard for your upcoming Ryzen based system. Let’s go over the key elements of the motherboard, and let Gavin do the rest of the talking in the video… shall we?

Performance

Looking at it purely from a statistical standpoint, the results are often well within a margin of error, and therefore it is difficult to judge based on that alone. However, none of the results did hit the top marker, which is to be expected as it is in that price bracket where it shouldn’t be outperforming the higher end products. The performance is average, but it isn’t the worst that we’ve come across thus far. It did load our Ballistix memory profiles without too much hassle, which is a big plus.

Where the board does lack a little is the VRM area of the motherboard. There are only seven power phases to feed the CPU, which is ample for average overclocks, but you most certainly will not be able to push the boundaries in terms of overclocks.

Design

If you like race cars and are chasing that checkered flag, this might be a board for you. Personally, it’s not one that I like the design of, but I can appreciate that they are just trying to be different to the rest of the competition out there, and are trying something different. Gavin did like the design, which shows you that we all have our opinions and that there is nothing wrong with having a different opinion to your colleague. As Gavin said, the board itself is bare looking, which could be your cup of tea, or it could not be.

When we talk about the layout of the board, it is well thought out and you can clearly see that Biostar has not just gone gung-ho with it to cram as many things in a tight a space as possible to save a few pennies (if that?) on the PCB itself. There is adequate spacing between the two PCI-E lanes where you may wish to place your graphics cards, and there is also the fact that the M.2 port is positioned above the primary x16 lane to help with heat dissipation. Those M.2 drives get hot, and you do not want them under an even warmer GPU.

In terms of its IO, yes, it is a little lacklustre, but it does also serve its purpose to give you enough connectivity to the point where 9/10 of you would be more than satisfied with the options available to you. I would’ve liked to see more USB 3.1 ports and even an IO shield, but beggars cannot be choosers in this instance.

Value

For what you get based on its price of £150/$160, it is hard to say that it is bad value, but it isn’t good value either. There are other alternatives on the market which would sooner get my recommendation over the Biostar RACING X370GT5, but everyone has their personal preference in terms of their go-to manufacturer. I would have liked to have seen a little more on the IO front as mentioned previously, and perhaps a little more focus on the power delivery to allow you to overclock comfortably. With that in mind, I am going to rattle on to my final thoughts…

Final Thoughts

Biostar is not as competitive in some markets compared to the big players like ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI, but they have pumped out a product which punches well and can hold its own against the big boys. It will be not be receiving any awards from us today for its value, design, or performance; but it will be picking up a silver award to let you guys know that it is one worth buying, but it wouldn’t be the first on my list if I were to recommend it to you.