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BIOSTAR T-Power I45

Last year we reviewed BIOSTAR's T-Force P965 Deluxe. The board was simply outstanding and was certainly on par with offerings from other more recognized builders of enthusiast class motherboards. Today we are looking at another T-Force series offering; the T-Force TPower I45. Is this BIOSTAR motherboard up to the test?

Introduction

BIOSTAR is a name that's been around for some time now however the name usually brings up images of cheap motherboards that are usually far from what the enthusiast crowd would consider viable for their own machines. However BIOSTAR decided to enter the enthusiast market and try and change everyone's perception about their products.

Last year we reviewed BIOSTAR's T-Force P965 Deluxe. The board was simply outstanding and was certainly on par with offerings from other more recognized builders of enthusiast class motherboards. Unfortunately the boards' availability was poor and even a couple of months after the review was written you couldn't hardly find these boards in stock anywhere. Today we are looking at another BIOSTAR enthusiast offering, the T-Power I45. The board is relatively light on features but promises excellent overclocking and stability. On the box they make mention of 600MHz+ FSB clocks.

The BIOSTAR T-Power I45 uses Intel's P45 chipset which is their latest mainstream chipset destined to replace the P35 chipset. Really there are very few improvements with the P45 chipset when compared to the P35 chipset. The main difference is that it is manufactured on a smaller process and as a result of this and possibly other changes; it runs much cooler than the P35 chipsets did. Also it is combined with Intel's latest south bridge. The ICH10R. Really there is nothing ground breaking about either chipset.

One nice feature is that they've improved things a bit for the folks who want to run multiple ATI GPUs in Crossfire. The P45 supports an 8x8 configuration instead of a 16x4 configuration. While this is an improvement it wasn't impossible to do on the P35 as ASUS had already done it with their Crosslinx chip. The BIOSTAR T-Power I45 supports the supports the latest Intel ® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core / Core™2 Duo / Intel® Pentium® Extreme and Intel® Pentium® D processors. As with most motherboards made today, few components are required to complete a working system. All that is needed is an LGA775 processor, DDR2 memory modules, power supply, video card, and drives to make a functional box. BIOSTAR has integrated the following into the T-Power I45: 1 ATA 133 port, 1 floppy port, 6 SATA ports (4 SATA ports provided by the ICH10R, 2 eSATA via the JMicron controller), 12 USB ports (6 on the IO panel, 6 via USB headers), 1 GigE Ethernet port, and standard keyboard and mouse ports.

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Specifications Overview:

Packaging

The T-Power I45 comes in a huge box. There isn't much in it and the box takes up incredible real-estate. Included items are: manual, driver disk, 4 pin to SATA power cables, optical and SPIDF bracket, SATA data cables, IDE cable, I/O shield, and BIOSTAR included the Cooler Harbor bundle which includes heatsink, thermal pad, mounting screws, and a fan.

Board Layout

I pulled the BIOSTAR T-Power I45 out of the box and I was pleasantly surprised. The layout of the board is very good with very few problem areas. Immediately I really liked the heat pipe system the board uses. Also included with the cooling system was a 60mm fan with an additional heatpipe and more copper fins. This attaches to the PWM heatsink and has a thin thermal pad that makes contact between the two heat sinks. The fan is nice and large and screws into place using fairly large screws. I wasn't sure how well it worked but it sure looked neat while being nice and simple. There really isn't much to say as BIOSTAR did about everything right with the layout on this one. The only complaint I've really got is with the placement of the IDE connector. It is very poorly placed but it probably won't matter for most people as they'll be using SATA drives instead.

The CPU area is very clear of obstructions. Using just about any cooling solution should be problem free on the T-Power I45. The large chipset cooling fan tower that comes with the board could potentially create some clearance issues, but it should be fine for most cooling solutions.

The T-Power I45 has 4 DDR2 DIMM slots that are color coded in the industry standard fashion. The slots are a nice distance from the CPU and best of all you can open all the slot tabs with a full length video card such as the 8800GTX or 9800GX2 installed. In fact I put this to the test as I had a spare 8800GTX lying around. I threw that in the machine and found it easy to install or remove memory modules with it installed.

The north bridge is placed in the usual area to the left of the CPU socket. As I mentioned before the north bridge is cooled by a simple heat pipe and copper heat sink setup. There is an optional Cooler Harbor bundle that can be attached. This solution is nothing more than a heatsink tower which adds onto and augments the heat dissipation of the existing chipset cooling solution. Not only does this solution look good in my opinion, but it is relatively small which keeps it from creating clearance issues. Also the cooling system seemed to work well here. It was never really hot to the touch even while overclocking. However, with the Cooler Harbor bundle in use I found the noise of the included fan absolutely unbearable. The fan not only had a fairly high pitched whine (which frankly I can’t get used to) it made a rattling noise. Now granted this was on an open test bench. Had this been in a case I may not have had such a hard time ignoring the noise. The rattling was so bad that I actually unplugged the fan while the board was running at stock speeds. I left it off for the most part until I needed to start the overclocking of the board. I'm not one to complain about noise as most of my equipment sounds like it's getting ready to hit the runway for takeoff. The chipset got somewhat warm to the touch but nowhere near as warm as most of the P35 chipset based boards I've worked with. So while I thought the cooling system was nicely done I think that BIOSTAR could have spent a little more money on the fan and put something on it that was far less annoying. Then again, possibly we simply had a “bad” fan unit.

The south bridge is placed directly in between the two PCI-Express x16 slots. The CMOS battery is placed just behind it and all the internal SATA connectors are placed in front of the south bridge. BIOSTAR chose to use the angled connectors with the locking tab support. This is a good move and only makes sense. Some manufacturers use the straight up style without supporting the SATA cables that lock into place. Its' good to see BIOSTAR did this right.

The T-Power I45 supports the PCI-Express 2.0 specification and has dual PCI-Express x16 slots. Like all P45 chipset based boards I've seen thus far the T-Power I45 supports a 16x4 lane configuration or an 8x8 configuration which is better suited to dual video card operation than the 16x4 lane configuration is. What's unusual here is the configuration of the PCI-Express x16 slots is configured by jumper blocks. This is something I can't recall having seen since the nForce 4 days. For whatever reason (likely due to cost) BIOSTAR chose to use this type of setup rather than allowing the board to configure the slots automatically based on how many lanes the device in the second PCI-Express slot tries to use. There are also two additional PCI-Express x1 slots as well as two standard legacy PCI slots. Overall the expansion slots are placed well and plenty of space is left between them in most cases. The spacing is especially ideal for dual video card configurations as well.

The T-Power I45 I/O panel has the standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, IEEE1394 port, 6 USB ports, two RJ-45 ports, two eSATA ports, and six mini-headphone jacks.

T-Power 2

The T-Power 2 application is completely different from the applications I've seen with BIOSTAR boards in the past. To be honest I found the utility a little bit "busy" in its' appearance but the utility is easy to use. The utility has four functions. OC Tweaker, Biowatch, eHot-Line, and BIOSTAR Flash.

The OC Tweaker is where all the tuning takes place. Here you can adjust the CPU and voltage settings manually. Information concerning the memory clock, PCI-Express and PCI clocks are also displayed here. Voltages for the CPU, Memory, NB and FSB can all be adjusted within the utility. To the left the GPU and GPU memory clocks are displayed. To the right you can access five different presets for overclocking. They are labeled V6, V8, V12, and V16. While that sounds really cool, it isn't. Using an E6300 the most extreme setting (V16) only gave a total clock speed of 2004MHz. So basically all I got was a 200MHz increase in the CPU clock speed. So that's nothing to write home about.

You can create and save your own profiles which is a good thing. You can also restore the defaults if needed. The eHot-Line function provides a way for technical support data to be collected and submitted to the manufacturer. All in all a simple function that was really self explanatory. BIOSTAR flash allows you to backup and update the system BIOS. It also displays the board model and AMIBIOS version and BIOS build date.

Biowatch is kind of interesting. It displays all of your temperatures and voltage values in the same window for easy monitoring. From here you can also set fan speeds automatically or manually by adjusting the settings on the right side of the utility window. When you click on the Settings button you get the Fan Conditioner options panel. Here you can set the target CPU temperature and the CPU temperature that enables full fan speeds as well as the thermal threshold for system shutdown.