Closer Look
The X870E Valkyrie arrived in a well-described retail package. The box is medium-sized compared to the average motherboard box size. It has two levels: a motherboard on the top and a lower level, which hides all the cables and manuals.
Inside the box is a motherboard, a quick installation guide, four SATA data cables, a smart front panel connector, a motherboard diagram, and some Valkyrie stickers. It’s everything we may need for the installation and more.
The motherboard’s design reminds me of the earlier Valkyrie motherboards. It keeps the dominant black color, with pink and yellow-gold details.
The motherboard has an eye-catching design, but it also lacks all the tool-less features promoted by competitive brands. This is not a big problem for most users, as not many often replace components, but computer enthusiasts may see it as a disadvantage.
The motherboard has a main PCIe slot and one of the M.2 sockets in the 5.0 standard. The three other M.2 sockets work up to PCIe 4.0 x4 mode. If we use the second PCIe slot, the main PCIe slot will run in an 8x+8x mode. I know this is good news, as I saw some complaints about some competitive motherboards that share the primary PCIe slot with M.2 sockets. It won’t happen on the X870E Valkyrie.
The X870E Valkyrie has a 22-power phase design with 110A phases and uses high-end capacitors. The power design is more than enough for all Ryzen AM5 processors. During the tests, we couldn’t hear any coil whine, which suggests the high quality of the design.
As with all X870 and X870E motherboards, the Valkyrie is equipped with fast M.2 sockets, PCIe slots, and the flagship improvement, a native USB4. However, we won’t find WiFi 7, another new controller, which Biostar decided not to deliver with its motherboard. Biostar gives us antenna connectors and an M.2 socket dedicated to an M.2 WiFi card. Considering it’s the highest Biostar model, we could expect the WiFi card to be installed on the motherboard. All those who don’t read the information on the website thoroughly will be disappointed.
The X870E Valkyrie has a 2.5Gbps LAN, a standard in the current generation of motherboards, so it’s hard to call it an advantage over the competition. It still works well and is more than enough for most users.
Another thing that isn’t bad but already feels like a standard option is audio. Some competitive motherboards use Realtek ALC4082 or other 4000 series codecs. Biostar decided to stay with the already old ALC1220, which we can also see on Gigabyte motherboards and lower series of other brands.
The X870E Valkyrie supports all the popular DDR5 memory kits up to 8000MT/s. However, because of how the AMD Ryzen works, the optimal still seems to be 6400MT/s, and the best is dual-rank RAM. In our tests, we used Kingston Renegade RGB 96GB 6400MT/s CL32 kit, which seems the best around as it’s the fastest option at a 1:1 ratio, has a dual-rank design, and runs at tight timings out of the box. However, the X870E Valkyrie couldn’t run at 6400MT/s and a 1:1 ratio, and the 6200MT/s was the maximum. It has an option in BIOS that improves the performance, and it works well, so we won’t see the difference, but some of the competitive motherboards run at higher frequencies and have the option to improve the bandwidth and latency.
Above are some example photos of the test rig. As you can see, the Valkyrie has an RGB backlight under the I/O and VRM heatsink cover. The RGB software works well, and we had no problems adjusting all the colors and modes.
On the next page of this review, I will show you what we will find in Biostar BIOS/UEFI.
