Biostar TPower i55 – Super Middle Weight Contender
by Rajinder Gill on November 25, 2009 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Setup -
We utilized a wide variety of memory kits from Corsair, OCZ, Patriot, GSkill, and Kingston to verify memory compatibility on our test boards. Our OS and primary applications are loaded on the Kingston 80GB SSD drive and our games operate off the WD 300GB VRaptor drive. We did a clean install of the OS and applications for each motherboard.
We chose the ASUS GTX275 video card and Corsair’s 750HX power supply. Our air cooler of choice is Thermalright’s Ultra 120 eXtreme, primarily for its exceptional performance during our overclocking tests. We also tested with the retail cooler and those results along with direct CPU comparisons can be found here.
Our 790FX/X58 results are provided for comparison only. For our test results we setup each board as closely as possible in regards to memory timings. Otherwise all other settings are left on auto. The P55 and 790FX motherboards utilized 8GB of DDR3, while the X58 platform contained 6GB. The P55 and X58 DDR3 timings were set to 7-7-7-20 1T at DDR3-1600 for the i7/920, i7/870, and i7/860 processors at both stock and overclocked CPU settings.
We used DDR3-1333 6-6-6-18 1T timings for the i5/750 stock setup as DDR3-1600 is not natively supported in current BIOS releases for this processor at a stock Bclk setting of 133. We had early BIOS releases that offered the native 1600 setting but stability was a serious problem and support was pulled for the time being. Performance is essentially the same between the two settings.
The AMD 790FX setup is slightly different as trying to run DDR3-1600 at CAS 7 timings on the 1:4 divider is extremely difficult. Without resorting to some serious overvolting and relaxing of sub-timings, we set our AMD board up at DDR3-1600 8-8-8-20 1T timings but with NB speed at 2200. The difference in performance between C7 and C8 DDR3-1600 is practically immeasurable in applications and games on this platform.
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Joepublic2 - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
Rajinder, is there any way to differentiate the new foxconn sockets from the old (serial/part numbers, a visual difference between the two)?Rajinder Gill - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
Hi Joe,None that I know of I'm afraid. If I do find anything out, I'll update.
regards
Raja
NumericalMethods - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
In your great overclocking section I see you have once again exceeded the 1.21v Intel recommended Vtt specification (by a fair amount). Is this something you would be comfortable with for 24/7 running or is this just to demonstrate the limits of the board?I have no real concept of why the Vtt spec has changed from Bloomfield but if I were running a P55 system overclocked 24/7 I suspect I couldn't expect to reach a 4+GHz overclock - it would be limited by 'safe' voltage.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
The Intel voltage specifications are given out in relation to stock operating frequencies. Increase freqeuncy and you increase power, so if you're really following Intel guidelines, then you need to observe stock operating frequencies too.There is no definative answer to what kind of degredation a CPU will experience due to elevated voltage/current long term. One can assume that the degredation will be faster, but whether or not that will be a factor for the end-user is another matter. Of course, too much voltage is certainly asking for trouble. We generally run stuff just to show what the board can do. At least it answers the question for people who like to push hard. At the same time, if the board is stable at higher operating frequencies, the more sensible stuff is ceratinly possible.
regards
Raja
Absolution75 - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
I always find that the most relevant information to me is left out of every motherboard review.Benchmarks for motherboards are always very similar, in fact, they are so similar that in my opinion, aren't worth mentioning. If there is a strange issue with USB speeds being low (which I've seen before), then that probably is the only benchmark that really needs any type of graph. Do people really care if the board A gets a 1KBPS higher score on the network test than board B? I'm sure this is well within the margin of error of the test anyway. This may be what you're getting at when you guys have switched the conclusion to the first page of the review, which I thought was a good decision.
Relevant information that always seems to be missing:
1) Are the fan headers able to be controlled by bios? If so, how and how well? Can they all be controlled or just a few? Sometimes it specifies, but it fails to provide any real details.
2) The audio chip. Realtek did a wonderful job at creating 'optional' features on a few of their codec’s. I bought the MSI P55-GD65 board on launch date and assumed it could do real time DDL encoding (like my old gigabyte P45-UD3P which uses the same audio codec), little did I know, that this optional feature is disabled. Apparently 'true blue ray audio' doesn't really mean much. A simple paragraph about the audio chip's capabilities would be nice. Especially since some motherboards use VIA's codec’s which tend to be even more confusing than Realtek's.
3) Strange things such as mentioning who makes the chip for the NIC and other random things would be nice. For some reason, I have a good bias towards Marvell NICs. This information seems to be included more often lately :D
4) Information about how board features are integrated into the motherboard. Is that gigabyte NIC running off a PCI-E lane or PCI?
5) Useful information about strange features such TPM headers (which you made no mention of in the MSI P55-GD65).
Specifically for this review, it is said that this board is trying to compete with the MSI P55-GD65 and you say it has an advantage even though it is more expensive ($25-$45 more). How though? It is never really said. Both boards perform identically (in fact, probably any P55 board will perform identically to another. . .) and both have similar layouts. The MSI board has 1 more PCI-E slot along with an open slot PCI-E x4. How is this not an advantage? Both have dual NICs, 2 more SATA2 ports (with the MSI board having a better solution imo - the single blue slot on the board is useful for a disk drive leaving the entire 6x SATA2 ports on the P55 chipset for some type(s) or RAID) and digital audio.
Also, a complete guess, but board designers probably still include the floppy drive header just because its included in the chip they use for IDE and additional SATA (maybe jmicron doesn't make a chip that is just IDE/SATA instead of IDE/SATA/floppy), or maybe they just cost the same. . .
ereavis - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - link
"Test Setup" is a big missing for me. What are you calling an "Intel P55" on these charts or all the Intel P55 motherboards from $90-$240 the same performance?g725s - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Cool conclusion on first page. Keep it up!Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Some seem to like it while others are not impressed (check the firs page of comments). I'll probably do some kind of exec front page summary in the future.later
Raja
treesloth - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
FWIW, I like it. Interestingly to me, it's essentially the same layout and format that I use for my testing an analysis at work, so I actually feel sort of vindicated. :-)treesloth - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
FWIW, I like it. Interestingly to me, it's essentially the same layout and format that I use for my testing an analysis at work, so I actually feel sort of vindicated. :-)