Biostar Z790-A Silver Motherboard Review – $200 US Mainstream Board

Conclusion - Bare Minimum

The Biostar Z790-A Silver is one of the several Z790 motherboard options that you can find in the $180-$200 US price segment. These options each have their benefit but ultimately, a Z790 board should be the definition of high-end designs with mainstream and budget users targeting the B760 or the much lower-end H610 segments. Biostar made a good decision keeping its Z790 lineup very simple with just two offerings and I think they could've done things better by making the A-Silver a slightly better product but I guess this is the limit of what they can achieve with the production costs of such boards.

So coming to the performance aspect, the Intel Core i9-13900K ran well at stock with a few minor hiccups in multi-threaded workloads since the VRMs were being pushed a bit too hard and getting really hot. The two standard heatsinks can only offer so much cooling. The memory support of up to 7200 MT/s is good but the majority in the QVL list are sub 7000 MT/s speeds which I don't find that much of an issue since that is what most users buying this tier of board will be getting anyway.

In terms of storage options, three M.2 slots are good enough with a heatsink dedicated to your primary storage and six SATA III ports are also good. USB support is good with Type-C on the front and back and a 2.5 GbE LAN port is also decent but the older ALC1220 code is a bit of a bummer. While there is no WIFI card on the board, it does offer an additional M.2 Key-E slot to support add-in cards but the dual M.2 mechanism is a bit weird. Some users may also be put off by the lack of RGB on this board but there are enough LED headers to customize your build and there's support for a variety of RGB sync software.

Other standard features such as a lack of I/O shield and a very modest-looking design are a downside but if you are looking for a very basic Z790 motherboard, then the A-Silver can be considered a choice. The pricing is around $200 US at retailers but I'd suggest that you look out for price drops around $179-$189 US for this motherboard as that makes a lot more sense for the features it has on offer. With the Z790-A Silver, you would get a decent experience from a high-end Intel Core K-series CPU (unless you are overclocking it).

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