Biostar TP45 HP review

Taiwan's Biostar is perhaps a less well-known name than its rivals this month. That's because the company doesn't make mainstream boards: as the TP45 HP clearly demonstrates, its priorities lay elsewhere.

For a start, it's the only Socket 775 board to offer CrossFireX. Since the P45 chipset shares 16 PCI Express 2 lanes between the two PCI Express x16 slots, you won't get the full bandwidth from both cards, but it still reaches out to those who demand top performance.

It's also the only board in its class to come with onboard controls, plus LEDs to help troubleshoot hardware problems by alerting you to errors in the memory controller, video system or chipset.

Not surprisingly, the BIOS has plenty of tweaking options too, although oddly you can turn voltages up but not down - evidently, Biostar customers aren't interested in underclocking their PCs to make them run more quietly.

Beyond that, the expected features are all present and correct. Four DIMM sockets will take up to 16GB of DDR2, at speeds up to 1,200MHz. You get six SATA ports and one IDE controller, although there's no RAID. And the six USB ports on the backplate are ample, if not quite as liberal as the eight offered by Asus and Gigabyte. Our only gripe is that, once again, eSATA is nowhere to be seen.

The TP45 HP's idle power draw of 87W is an average figure, which neither recommends nor damns the board. Ultimately, the question is what you want from a motherboard: the Biostar will surely appeal to techies, but others may prefer a more mainstream option such as our recommended Gigabyte.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith