Biostar TPower I45

Comes with a heatpipe carrying handle for easy installation!

Biostar presents its dark-chocolate flavoured version of the P45 board with some pretty interesting design choices. Although you can’t tell from the picture, that fan assembly above the power regulation was not installed at stock, and came bundled in it’s own packaging inside the mobo. A small strip of adhesive goop works to fill the gaps, and the heatsink became slightly warm during testing – showing that it was actually doing something towards cooling the mobo. This does mean that the CPU socket is a little cramped, but it’s nothing that can’t be worked around with some patience (or child-sized hands).

The power connectors and RAM slots are placed in the usual locations, with six right-angled SATA ports on the right-hand side of the board – great for installing devices with longer graphics cards. Just above these is a clear CMOS header, which will be blocked by those longer cards that we love so much (and seem so common these days).

Power and reset buttons are in the bottom corner, and are even backlit for visibility inside a darkened case. Also present here is an LED screen that displays the CPU temperature constantly – great for windowed cases or overclockers. We’ll also take our hats off to anyone who manages to mod it to display anything else.

The usual bevy of headers are down the bottom, and the expansion slots remain decidedly similar to the other boards… apart from one thing. An archaic header-switching system is used here instead of the automatic system used on most other boards, which can make using Crossfire difficult if you haven’t used these before.

On the back panel we have six USB ports, two eSATA, one Ethernet, audio and PS/2 ports; nothing particularly exciting to be found here.

The BIOS is well laid-out, with plenty of options for tweaking voltages and other settings, as well as a failsafe mechanism to restore default settings if something goes awry, which is all too common when overclocking. This board has been used to break many world records, with an FSB reaching well over seven hundred MHz.

With good features, excellent overclocking potential and a great price, this is one board you can’t afford to miss.