BIOSTAR Announces Two New Mini-ITX RACING Motherboards

BIOSTAR introduced the newest addition to the RACING series of motherboards with the new RACING Z270GTN and the RACING B250GTN mini-ITX motherboards. These two new motherboards have been built for enthusiasts who want a great feature set without the size of a full ATX motherboard.

The BIOSTAR RACING Z270GTN and RACING B250GTN come packed with the features we’ve come to known from the RACING series such as the 5050 LED Fun Zone with dual 5050 LED header and the VIVID LED DJ that allows full RGB LED control. The LGA1151 socket is ready for Kaby Lake processors and the motherboards support up to DDR4-3200 memory for the RACING Z270GTN and up to 2400 on the B250GTN. The difference is based on the two chipsets used, the Z270 and B250.

Both motherboards come with Intel i219V Gigabit Ethernet LAN and feature BIOSTAR’s LAN surge protection for maximum stability. There’s room for one M.2 Key-M SSD through the PCIe x4 32Gbps connector, allowing you to install the latest NVMe drives. There’s also a U.2 connector along with four SATA connectors. While we’re at the storage part of these two new motherboards, there is a small difference in the SATA connectors. The Z270GTN supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 while the B250GTN only supports AHCI. They’re also ready by Intel’s upcoming Optane Memory technology.

Connection wise, the boards have the same IO panel. It features a PS2 mouse and keyboard combo port as well as four USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. There’s also a DVI-D and an HDMI port for the iGPU and a 7.1 channel audio solution. The audio part is covered by a Realtek ALC892 codec.

Internally there is one USB 2.0 header and one USB 3.0 header that supports two ports each. You can connect one CPU fan and one system fan, so more fan connections will have to be run through splitters or fan hubs.