Biostar TPower i55 – Super Middle Weight Contender
by Rajinder Gill on November 25, 2009 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
There's really no other way to say this: Biostar’s Tpower i55 performs almost exactly the same as any other P55 motherboard in every single benchmark we ran.
Application tests, game tests, LAN tests, even USB, Firewire, and SATA controller performance was virtually identical across the board. We've known for a while now that motherboards of a given generation all perform the same, but there's honestly no more to it than that.
We've included a wealth of application, gaming and peripheral performance data for you to see for yourself, but honestly, features, overclocking potential, support, and price point are what matter here.
The biggest difference between the boards, from a performance standpoint, actually surfaces in power consumption:
At idle the Biostar TPower i55 draws just 2W more power with the Core i5/750 than the MSI GD-65, which is excellent considering MSI’s advantage over other boards in this sector. When the 750 is overclocked, it draws slightly less power than all competing P55 boards except for the MSI GD65.
Application/Gaming Performance
We're presenting all of the application/gaming performance data without commentary because, as we mentioned before - there's no real appreciable performance difference between these three boards. All of the boards were run with the Core i5 750 and we've included the Phenom II X4 965 BE as well as the i7 860, 870 and 920 purely for reference. Please check our Lynnfield launch article to see how well this processor performs against a variety of CPUs.
In many of our tests, the Core i5 750 is the same speed or faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE. The lack of Hyper Threading prevents it from being a runaway success. In other cases, the Phenom II X4 965 is faster - and by a large degree.
Intel was very careful to disable HT on the 750, without it, there would be no reason to spend the extra money on the Core i7 860. Just as it was with Bloomfield, $284 is the sweet spot for Lynnfield if absolute performance is a requirement. Now for the benchmarks.
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granulated - Friday, December 4, 2009 - link
I want to know how why the AMD board murders the rest in two games when it's in it's more usual 'bringing up the rear' position in the rest.ta2 - Monday, November 30, 2009 - link
Seems like you've been using a pretty crappy i5 chip. For it to top out as 4.1GHz is incredibly bad. I manage 4GHz on a GA-P55-UD4 with ALL voltages at stock except VCore at 1.30V. You have not really pushed the BCLK on this board and for you to need 1.36V for 4.1GHz is pretty terrible. I consider myself a novice overclocker, but either you're using a very bad chip or this board isn't so hot."We could run our memory at DDR3-2152". This board is officially rated up to 2600MHz for memory... so we haven't even tried to get close to the spec speed.
Rajinder Gill - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - link
It's an average 750 CPU. There are plenty out there that top out early.With regards to 2600 MHz memory, I don't know of any CPU's that can hold 2600MHz speeds fully application stable. That's a benchmarking claim for users who run processors with sub zero cooling or like to post suicide shots. This article is focused on daily PC use. A BCLK of 215 is perfectly respectable for everyday usage scenarios (especialy with S3 resume working).
later
Raja
lopri - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
The board looks really awesome. I mean, the fact one of the main gripes is the lack of clear CMOS button in the rear I/O panel says a lot. I like that Biostar used the Intel ethernet PHY to take advantage of ICH10R's built-in network controller. So many times I see CPU usages going 20~30% when there is heavy network trafficking, and I wondered why my experiences are so different from what I see in the reviews. Granted different packets show different performance characteristics and anti-virus is probably half of that CPU load, but the CPU usage wasn't as severe on my BadAxe 2 (which I use for WHS) so I do believe the Intel NIC/PHY is superior to that of Realtek.Another welcome news is the flawless S3 functionality under overclocking, and I applaud it very, very much. Board's layout looks extremely clean and logical as well. For me the downside of this board are the lack of fan headers and the price tag which can be (hopefully) rectified in the future.
Thank you for a thorough review (for a split second I thought Gary was the author, but please don't take offense ;) ) and I just might have found my next motherboard.
lopri - Saturday, November 28, 2009 - link
Well, actually I do have one more gripe. I am not a fan of daisy chained heatsinks, and on this board the heatsink with 'Biostar' written on it kinda sticks out. I'm guessing what's underneath are those 4 PCIe blocks often found bare on other boards. (?) How hot do they get and do you think it's justified to having a heatsink over it based on that? If not, I'd prefer to have more room for CPU HSF installation and video card installation.Rajinder Gill - Saturday, November 28, 2009 - link
Hi,The BIOSTAR logo sink does not really cover anything other than to add mass to the enitire assembly. Stock operating conditions, you could get away with passive use. If overclocking and raising PWM switching frequency(for whatever reason), while runnign a 'hot' GPU in the first slot, you'll probably want to cool the HS assembly depending on what kind of case you have. The lack of fan headers obviously does not help.
regards
Raja
lopri - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - link
Thank you for the clarification. That said, since the board is kind of heavy on use of heatsinks, maybe they can use real screws instead of plastic push-pins? Faced with the Almighty AnandTech editors' advice, who knows? Biostar might listen. *wink* *wink*yuhong - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
"It’s the first time in a long time we’ve not had to request fixes for peripherals or BIOS issues/tweaks to complete a benchmark, a welcome change indeed!"Yep, remember this:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3471">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3471