Biostar TPower i55 – Super Middle Weight Contender
by Rajinder Gill on November 25, 2009 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Multitasking-
The vast majority of our benchmarks are single task events that utilize anywhere from 23MB up to 1.4GB of memory space during the course of the benchmark. Obviously, this is not enough to fully stress test our 6GB or 8GB memory configurations. We devised a benchmark that would simulate a typical home workstation and consume as much of the 6GB/8GB as possible without crashing the machine.
We start by opening two instances of Internet Explorer 8.0 each with six tabs opened to flash intensive websites followed by Adobe Reader 9.1 with a rather large PDF document open, and iTunes 8 blaring the music selection of the day loudly. We then open two instances of Lightwave 3D 9.6 with our standard animation, Cinema 4D R11 with the benchmark scene, Microsoft Excel and Word 2007 with large documents, and finally Photoshop CS4 x64 with our test image.
Before we start the benchmark process, our idle state memory usage is 4.05GB.
We wait two minutes for system activities to idle and then start playing Pinball Wizard via iTunes, start the render scene process in Cinema 4D R11, start a resize of our Photoshop image, and finally the render frame benchmark in Lightwave 3D. Our maximum memory usage during the benchmark is 5.62GB with 100% CPU utilization across all four or eight threads.
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dia - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
The fan header information is on page 3
"Fan control is only offered for the CPU fan header, offering full temperature range and speed control which is great. Unfortunately the SYS fans cannot be controlled independently from the CPU FAN header. "
There is also reference to software level control via TOVERCLOCK/TPOWER.
jackylman - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
It's still unclear to me. The quoted section only seems to refer to the BIOS setting. The screenshot shows a fan RPM tab for TPOWER, but I don't see any reference to whether it actually controls the fans or just reports RPM's (I suspect the latter).The question we really want answered is whether the non-CPU headers support PWM and can be controlled with SpeedFan (e.g.). If not, it would really be a shame to see another good board skimping on cheap PWM hardware.
Rajinder Gill - Saturday, November 28, 2009 - link
Both TPOWER and TOVERCLOCKER can change fan speed and offer monitoring. The SYS FANS cannot be controlled at all, so they are 'full on' all the time.I've changed the page 3 comment to reflect this.
regards
Raja
jackylman - Saturday, November 28, 2009 - link
Raja,That is much better. Thank You.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
In terms of overclocking, the BIOSTAR handles 8GB memory better than the MSI GD-65 (memory clocking in general is easier). Sleep mode is also a little more robust, allowing recovery from higher BCLK's. Other than that, one of the marks against the Gd-65 was the incompatibility of OC GENIE with several PSU's.As for the rest, thx for the feedback - I'll add what I can within the timeframe of test. there are some things we miss on due to oversight. It's not possible to keep everyone happy unfortunately, as with all things.
regards
Raja
marc1000 - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - link
No conclusion page on this review? Am I wrong or the conclusion is on the first page this time? =Delivebuy - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 - link
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ElderTech - Thursday, December 3, 2009 - link
RajaContrary to others, I find the new layout most efficient and a desireable journalistic change. As you point out, read the first page (or two) and determine if you want/need additional info. Also, your heading for the conclusion/summary section is clear and succinct. However, it doesn't surprise me that some may find it confusing, as there is a tendency to settle into a complacent pattern with much of life when we're able. But you'd think the younger average age of your readers would portend flexibility, but that's obviously not the case!