COMPUTEX — We paid Biostar a visit on Friday to learn about the firm's new products. Like any self-respecting motherboard manufacturer, Biostar had an X38-based motherboard prototype on display.

The board looks fairly standard as far as X38 prototypes go. However, the fact Biostar is even making a product like this signals a change of strategy for the firm. Biostar told me it's working on moving up market and joining the Asuses and Gigabytes of the world as a tier-one motherboard manufacturer.

Biostar's X38 board will have a full range of overclocking features—new staff joined Biostar specifically for that purpose—and the firm even worked on integrated audio quality to bump the signal-to-noise ratio to over 100dB. Pricing for the board should be around $200.

Of course, Biostar isn't denying its current value-friendly status, and it's also readying a mobo based on Nvidia's MCP73 integrated graphics chipset for Intel processors. This board should cost "about the same" as Biostar's existing GeForce 7050 offerings for AMD processors.

Biostar's last notable upcoming product was this GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card, which will come with 512MB of onboard memory and a price tag a little bit above $200. We typically frown on outfitting mainstream cards with oodles of unnecessary memory. However, considering the 8600 GTS's performance and the demands of current and upcoming games, this one seems appropriate. In fact, Biostar says the card does outperform other GeForce 8600 GTSes at high resolutions.