HARDOCP - Subsystem Testing - BIOSTAR T-Power I45

Date:: Monday , August 18, 2008
Author:: Daniel Dobrowolski
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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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?

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Subsystem Testing

NOTE: For all Subsystem Testing, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 clocked at 1.86GHz with 2x1024MB OCZ Flex XLC PC2-9200 (DDR2 1150MHz) memory modules were used. The CPU was cooled with a Corsair Nautilus and a Swiftech Apogee GT waterblock.

Audio – Subjective Listening

For subjective listening you want to listen to something that covers a range of sound types. For this portion of the review I went with System of a Down, Mesmerized.

The integrated sound solution proved to be adequate in this test. CD audio playback was flawless with no hissing or popping.

Audio – Microphone Port Testing

The onboard audio MIC-IN port was tested using a Logitech Internet Chat Headset. Spoken words were recorded from the Windows Sound Recorder found under the Accessories\Entertainment folder in the start menu within Windows XP. The recording was made with the Microphone Boost option disabled, then enabled. The Microphone Boost option is found within the advanced menu under the microphone section within the Volume Control Menu.

The audio playback of the recording sample wasn't all that great. It wasn't audible with the microphone boost option enabled and there was a great deal of distortion present when it was enabled.

Drive Performance

To test the capabilities of the on board USB 2.0 connections, we used an ACOMDATA HD060U2FE-72-USB 2.0/FireWire HDD connected first to the USB port. SATA and IDE drive tests were performed using Maxtor 80Gb ATA 133 model 6E080P0 hard drives on the IDE headers and Samsung 40 GB SATA 3G with NCQ hard drives on the SATA headers. The SATA drives were used for testing in RAID 0 16k block size configurations on all applicable controllers. Testing was also conducted using a standalone SATA drive on all applicable controllers, and an IDE drives connected in a primary slave configuration on the JM363 controller All drive benchmarks were done using the open source Iometer program.

As is typical of tests of this type, the results were clear. The RAID 0 configuration on the Intel ICH10R RAID controller provided the best performance overall. On a side note this is one of the few motherboards where hot plugging SATA drives worked correctly. The BIOS even has a setting for enabling and disabling this feature. SATA hot plugging should be supported on all SATA compatible motherboards but it fails to work more often than not. Nice to see BIOSTAR got things right with this one.

Network Utilization Tests

Hagel Technologies’ DU Meter software was used with Windows Task Manager to determine the performance levels of the onboard network interface. DU Meter was used to measure bandwidth and transfer speeds, while Windows Task Manager monitored CPU utilization on the test system. For the testing, a 750MB Archive file consisting of several compressed WMA/MP3 files was used for the large file transfer, and 750MB worth of MP3/WMA files were used ranging in sizes from 3 to 30MB was used for the small files transfer test. The test was performed using a plenum rated category 5e crossover cable to bypass any traffic, routing or other transfer issues and possible packet loss or corruption that can be caused by a router/switch or hub. The cables were connected between two test machines, one using the onboard NIC(s) of the board being reviewed and the other is an Intel EXPI9400PT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet adapter installed into a test machine using an Intel DX48BT2 motherboard.

For their integrated networking solution BIOSTAR chose Realtek’s PCI-Express based RTL8111C networking controller. It is capable of 10/100/1000MB speeds.

LAN1

The small files download test showed a maximum transfer speed of 51.00MB a second. The average transfer rate in the test was 26.99MB a second. CPU usage was relatively high at 19%. The small files upload test showed a maximum transfer speed of 41.97MB a second with an average of 24.02MB a second. CPU usage was a bit more reasonable this time at 13%.

The large files download test was slower than the small files test showing a peak transfer rate of 33.90MB a second. The average transfer rate was 32.71MB a second with the CPU usage coming in at 17%. The large files upload test yielded similar results clocking in with a maximum transfer speed of 27.33Mb a second and averaging 22.57MB a second. CPU usage was a modest 13%.

Test Systems

The following system configurations were used for the Sandra memory benchmark graph, as well as all graphs listed under the Application and Gaming Benchmarks sections:

Graphs are labeled as follows: Motherboard - CPU Clock - FSB Clock - Memory Clock

SiSoft Sandra XII -Memory Bandwidth Buffered

Note that all results above were obtained running the installed memory in Dual Channel mode with our BIOSTAR memory bus set at 960MHz. 1066MHz is advertised as spec on this board, but after 5 hours of fiddling with it, I could not get our memory bus stable at 1066MHz with our CPU bus at the stock 1600MHz. 960MHz memory

The DDR 2 based results are fairly solid here. The BIOSTAR T-Power I45 of course loses some ground to the newer DDR3 memory equipped test systems, but still holds its' own.