Closer Look / Product Photos
The B360GT5S arrived in a retail package which is a typical size box. Inside everything is also typical. We can find manuals, drivers DVD, SATA data cables, and I/O shield. Nothing that would cause unnecessary cost. What is important, the motherboard is well-protected for the time of transport and we are receiving everything that is required for installation.
The B360GT5S is using Realtek Audio 1150 codec which is quite popular and offers good audio experience. BIOSTAR improved audio quality with additional high-quality caps and other components and called all this feature Audio+. Here is what BIOSTAR says about it:
A combination of exclusive hardware & software design including “ground-isolation circuit design”,”an independent audio power”, and “a built=on-board amplifier”, with all these hardware features gives you the best audio quality and performance. As for software, we offer you a free bundle utility “Multi-Channel Calibration” which normally you’ll find in high level sound systems; this feature allows you to auto detect your location; with a user friendly interface, you can easily adjust the volume of every speakers to make a well balanced surround sound. And of course, the built-on-board amplifier always gives you a super powerful sound comparing to other motherboards.
Onboard are also two M.2 PCIe sockets. One runs at 32Gb/s and the other one at 16Gb/s. Only the slower one supports SATA drives while the faster socket also supports Optane technology.
Only one of the sockets has heatsink which helps to tame the fastest drives. Some of the highest NVMe series are generating a lot of heat and with this heatsink, the maximum temperature is about 10-15°C lower. Similar solutions use competitive brands but not all motherboards, especially these cheaper, have it.
Power design of the motherboard looks quite good. It looks like phases are split into CPU and IGP and additional controllers where CPU part, which is loaded more, is cooled by the heatsink. I don’t think that anyone who decides on the B360 motherboard will push it to the limits and memory overclocking is already limited so this power design should be more than enough. For sure it’s stable for typical work and there are no issues to achieve declared speed.
What is interesting, auto settings on this motherboard are causing CPU to run a bit faster than at Intel default settings. It’s because the motherboard sets (fully stable) 102MHz bclk. It doesn’t change much but it’s still worth to mention as it will affect test results and may add 1-2FPS in some games.
Except what I’ve mentioned, all other features are rather common for the B360 chipset and most motherboard share similar specification. We could say that dual BIOS is something special but many competitive brands are using it too. Design of the PCB is also good but nothing exceptional. Everything looks good, soldering is high-quality and used components also meet all requirements. We can count on a well-performing and stable platform what we will check in our tests.
A motherboard can be well-designed but a lot depends on BIOS/UEFI so let’s take a look at what options BIOSTAR B360GT5S has in BIOS/UEFI.
