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BIOSTAR A68N-5200 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/IntegratedCPU by stefan @ 2016-01-19

The A68N-5200 board, by incorporating one A6-5200 Kabini-based APU, is bringing to the table even more raw performance when compared to its A4-5000, while the GPU component gets a 100Mhz boost. While the increased 3D performance is minimal versus the A4, other tasks which require CPU performance will get up to 25% performance boost. Despite the fact that this is a cheap and low-powered board, BIOSTAR saw fit to include a fully-fledged UEFI interface which also contains some performance tuning options. Last but not least, we do get with the A68N-5200 one very-welcome PCI-E 2.0 x16 (x4 electrical) which invites us to install a dedicated video card.

The BIOS Interface Part I

The UEFI BIOS appearance has been preserved from the A68N-5000 board and features an easy to navigate system. Information like current time, CPU speed/voltage, memory frequency/voltage, fan speed and APU temperature are displayed on the left side, while the main menus are available on the bottom. The Main section informs us on the BIOS name, build date, total memory quantity and running speed and also here we will be able to alter the interface language and adjust the system date/time:

The Advanced menu is split in multiple sub-sections:

-PCI Subsystem Settings

-ACPI Settings/WakeUp Even Control

-CPU Configuration

-SATA Configuration

-USB Configuration

-Smart Fan Control

-SuperIO Configuration

-H/W Monitor

-Network Stack

From the PCI Subsystem Settings menu, we can adjust the PCI Latency Timer, enable VGA Palette Snoop and also work with the PCI Express Settings:

The ACPI Settings menu will present itself with the usual Power Management settings:

CPU Configuration menu allows us to enable or disable certain operation modes, including Core Leveling:

The SATA Configuration menu will let us work with the SATA controller and specify running modes; also here we will be shown the detected devices for both ports:

The USB Configuration menu lists the detected devices and allows enabling different related features for both USB 2.0 and 3.0:

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