Biostar TPower I55 review

Biostar TPower I55 review

Introduction
Biostar were founded in 1986, with their original focus being on XL motherboards. Since then, like any good business, they've developed and expanded their range and product quality. As far as enthusiasts go, back in the Socket A/ 478 days, their star (no pun intended) was pretty dim and awareness of their products fell behind those of companies like Asus, Abit, Gigabyte et al. They made some headway with AMD Socket 939 but it wasn't until Intel socket 775 developed and gave us P45 that Biostar went supernova. Their P45 boards filled global leaderboards until X48 came along, but Biostar were already much more in the enthusiasts field of vision. Biostar have been fairly quiet on the Intel side since Nehalem came along. They released X58 boards in the first wave of I7-fever, but were spending more time with AM2 and AM3 boards, with some notable success. The release of Intel P55 has seen Biostar release new boards, against strong competition from all the usual names. We have the TPower I55 here for review... lets see how it stacks up.

Box, Bits and Board

The Box:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-02.jpg

Very eye-catching! The gold is a head-turner... and is also damned hard to take a good picture of! Same criticism as the TH55.... the selling points in the corner are.... not selling points.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-03.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-05.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-04.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-06.jpg

Flipping over the box, we get details on the more interesting features of the board. The "G.P.U. Power Indicator, sadly, has nothing to do with GPUs or GPU power saving. It stands for "Green Power Utility" and the naming is heading towards being mis-leading. It is basically a set of LEDs that follow PWM utilisation.

The Bits:

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-07.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-08.jpg

Opening up the box, we get a very clean presentation. The contents are split into two layers, with the top layer being split into Left-Right packaging for protection.

Accessories: Five single S-ATA power leads, five S-ATA data cables, IDE and Floppy connectors, I/O plate, SLI and CF bridges and a bridge retention bracket. The cabling bundles are gathered together in branded velcro ties. Useful!

Also included are the usual manual and driver installation CD..

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y38/K404/I-55-10.jpg

Removing the top layer to get to the board, I was impressed to see the board sat in its own foam cutout. I'm not used to seeing this and does a very good job of protecting the board in transit. +1 here, no doubt about it.

Full review here!