Biostar

Biostar is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of computer peripherals and hardware such as motherboards and graphics cards, and barebones PCs and cube computers.

Biostar was founded in 1986 as the Biostar Microtech International Corp after a careful study of future trends likely to be observed in the computer peripherals and parts market, especially motherboards and add-on cards. The people involved with the founding of the company had gained immense experience in the buying and selling of electronics and computer parts in the early 1980s, when the global IT industry was in the midst of a big boom.

In its early years, Biostar mainly concentrated on the manufacturing of motherboards of the XT form factor. The company, however, was able to lower costs and maintain a steady growth; this allowed Biostar to invest a significant part of its capital and manpower into R&D and develop newer designs and products. The company claims that its sustained R&D policy is the primary reason why it remains one of the leading contenders in the highly competitive and fast-evolving global computer peripherals market.

In order to cater to the ever-expanding global demand, Biostar became one of the world’s first computer peripheral companies to establish a manufacturing facility in Mainland China. The year 1998 was a milestone year for the company; Biostar’s sales revenue exceeded USD 130 million and the company was ranked 227th among the top 1000 companies in Taiwan. One year later, in 1999, the company obtained the ISO 9001 certification. The same year, Biostar became an independent public listed company and started trading on the main floor of the Taiwan Stock Market.

Over the course of its history, Biostar has shifted from the manufacturing of SI/OEM products to branded products, which currently account for almost the entire 100% of the company’s production. The company has a presence in many nations across the globe and, beside Taiwan, maintains offices in mainland China, the USA and EU.

Biostar’s products are well sought after, as the company remains, up until now, the only manufacturer to allow easy voltage and frequency modification of the GPU and memory of its video cards. This enables easy and "extreme" overclocking; this feature found in Biostar graphics cards is especially appreciated by the gaming enthusiast community. Biostar motherboards, too, are designed for easy and "extreme" overclocking. The readily overclockable graphics cards are marketed under the "V-Ranger" or "V-Series" sub-brand, whereas the easily overclockable motherboards are marketed under the "T-series" sub-brand.

In the entry-level and barebones PC segment, Biostar’s products face stiff competition from Shuttle’s barebones PCs. Soltek, too, was once a major competitor.

A well known Biostar product is the iDEQ 200n, a small factor cube computer equipped with an AGP slot that has been designed for LAN gaming and multi-player game parties. The iDEQ 200n faces stiff competition from Shuttle barebones PCs such as Shuttle SK41G, Shuttle SN45G and Shuttle SK43G. The current Biostar iDEQ range is quite large and comprises offerings for both AMD (Socket 754, Socket 939, Socket A, Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+) and Intel (Socket 370, Socket 478 and Socket 775) processors.

Biostar does not offer graphic cards based on ATI chipsets, and only includes products from NVIDIA.