Biostar TPower X58 review

Like the Gigabyte, Biostar's X58 board is for tweakers. The BIOS gives plenty of tuning options, and mounted on the board you'll find power controls and a two-digit display showing POST results and CPU temperature.

It's reminiscent of the Gigabyte in other ways too: it has a huge 24GB RAM capacity and offers dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, although here there's no hardware support for teaming them to provide a 2Gb connection.

Yet little things mark it out as a slightly lesser board. You get six SATA channels instead of the usual eight, for example, and only a single PS/2 port. The board offers connectors for just three fans, versus the Gigabyte's five. There's no button to clear the CMOS, and while you can turn up the CPU voltage you can't set it lower than the CPU default, frustrating "cool and quiet" zealots.

It's also worth noting that, although the Gigabyte isn't a frugal board in terms of power consumption, the Biostar is worse with this month's highest idle figure - 120W.

If all these negative comparisons make the TPower X58 sound like a write-off, be assured it's still a well-specified board. As with the Asus P6T, in a typical desktop system its limitations are unlikely to hold you back. We're particularly inclined to forgive the absence of a dedicated PCI Express x4 slot, since realistically almost no-one will fill all three x16 slots.

But it's hard to swallow even such minor limitations when the TPower X58 costs effectively the same as the GA-EX58-UD5. If prices fall it could become a good buy, but for now, if you've got £191 to spend on a motherboard, it isn't the obvious choice.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith