Biostar TPower i55 – Super Middle Weight Contender
by Rajinder Gill on November 25, 2009 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Overclocking
The TPower i55 offers an excellent overclocking experience. Some additional BIOS tuning to improve memory performance would make this a great motherboard for most enthusiasts.
Core i5/750 8GB Results
Our maximum stable overclock on air-cooling with the Core i5/750 resulted in a 4.1GHz clock speed at a respectable 215MHz Bclk with a variety of 8GB DDR3-2000+ kits. The primary voltages settings were 1.3625V VCore, 1.35V VTT, 1.80V PLL, and 1.66V VDimm. We ran the board with Load Line Calibration enabled for stability due to the Dynamic VID setup on this board. This meant setting our voltage manually to 1.360V resulted in 1.368V readings under load and 1.088V at idle. We never encountered any problems with DVID, except for slightly lower benchmark scores as the system would generally take to ramp voltages before hitting maximum CPU core speeds.
We could run our memory at DDR3-2152 with 8GB loaded and the i5/750 on 1.66V VDimm. We scaled back to DDR3-1721 at C7 timings which offered the same performance, if not better, than DDR3-2152 C9.
Core i7/860 8GB Results
Our i7/860 fared better clocking wise than the i5/750, with a 20x215 setting for 4.3GHz. Memory was set at DDR3-2152 with 9-9-9-24 1T timings.
VTT is set to 1.38V, PLL at 1.80V, VDimm at 1.66V, and VCore at 1.425V with LLC enabled. Under load conditions VCore was +.005V with LLC enabled and -.02 with it disabled. At idle, VCore was 1.136V.
Thoughts
The overclocking results are very solid and certainly 4.1GHz~4.4GHz speeds are fast enough for most users. We initially thought the Dynamic VID setup would create problems with the board highly overclocked, but we never encountered any stability problems finding the voltage ramping to be unobtrusive and seamless to user experience.
Of note, we could not lock in the top turbo multiplier with our retail processors. Our i5-750 will operate at the 22x multiplier in manual mode on the Gigabyte and ASUS boards, but was limited to 21x on this board. That could be a problem for those looking to squeeze out that last few MHz, but for the majority of users it will not matter.
We have no concerns recommending the Biostar TPower i55 board for 24/7 overclocking use. When overclocked, the board is extremely stable and fast. As a side bonus, S3 resume worked properly with the Bclk settings at 215MHz.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
39 Comments
View All Comments
Joepublic2 - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
Rajinder, is there any way to differentiate the new foxconn sockets from the old (serial/part numbers, a visual difference between the two)?Rajinder Gill - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
Hi Joe,None that I know of I'm afraid. If I do find anything out, I'll update.
regards
Raja
NumericalMethods - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
In your great overclocking section I see you have once again exceeded the 1.21v Intel recommended Vtt specification (by a fair amount). Is this something you would be comfortable with for 24/7 running or is this just to demonstrate the limits of the board?I have no real concept of why the Vtt spec has changed from Bloomfield but if I were running a P55 system overclocked 24/7 I suspect I couldn't expect to reach a 4+GHz overclock - it would be limited by 'safe' voltage.
Rajinder Gill - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
The Intel voltage specifications are given out in relation to stock operating frequencies. Increase freqeuncy and you increase power, so if you're really following Intel guidelines, then you need to observe stock operating frequencies too.There is no definative answer to what kind of degredation a CPU will experience due to elevated voltage/current long term. One can assume that the degredation will be faster, but whether or not that will be a factor for the end-user is another matter. Of course, too much voltage is certainly asking for trouble. We generally run stuff just to show what the board can do. At least it answers the question for people who like to push hard. At the same time, if the board is stable at higher operating frequencies, the more sensible stuff is ceratinly possible.
regards
Raja
Absolution75 - Thursday, November 26, 2009 - link
I always find that the most relevant information to me is left out of every motherboard review.Benchmarks for motherboards are always very similar, in fact, they are so similar that in my opinion, aren't worth mentioning. If there is a strange issue with USB speeds being low (which I've seen before), then that probably is the only benchmark that really needs any type of graph. Do people really care if the board A gets a 1KBPS higher score on the network test than board B? I'm sure this is well within the margin of error of the test anyway. This may be what you're getting at when you guys have switched the conclusion to the first page of the review, which I thought was a good decision.
Relevant information that always seems to be missing:
1) Are the fan headers able to be controlled by bios? If so, how and how well? Can they all be controlled or just a few? Sometimes it specifies, but it fails to provide any real details.
2) The audio chip. Realtek did a wonderful job at creating 'optional' features on a few of their codec’s. I bought the MSI P55-GD65 board on launch date and assumed it could do real time DDL encoding (like my old gigabyte P45-UD3P which uses the same audio codec), little did I know, that this optional feature is disabled. Apparently 'true blue ray audio' doesn't really mean much. A simple paragraph about the audio chip's capabilities would be nice. Especially since some motherboards use VIA's codec’s which tend to be even more confusing than Realtek's.
3) Strange things such as mentioning who makes the chip for the NIC and other random things would be nice. For some reason, I have a good bias towards Marvell NICs. This information seems to be included more often lately :D
4) Information about how board features are integrated into the motherboard. Is that gigabyte NIC running off a PCI-E lane or PCI?
5) Useful information about strange features such TPM headers (which you made no mention of in the MSI P55-GD65).
Specifically for this review, it is said that this board is trying to compete with the MSI P55-GD65 and you say it has an advantage even though it is more expensive ($25-$45 more). How though? It is never really said. Both boards perform identically (in fact, probably any P55 board will perform identically to another. . .) and both have similar layouts. The MSI board has 1 more PCI-E slot along with an open slot PCI-E x4. How is this not an advantage? Both have dual NICs, 2 more SATA2 ports (with the MSI board having a better solution imo - the single blue slot on the board is useful for a disk drive leaving the entire 6x SATA2 ports on the P55 chipset for some type(s) or RAID) and digital audio.
Also, a complete guess, but board designers probably still include the floppy drive header just because its included in the chip they use for IDE and additional SATA (maybe jmicron doesn't make a chip that is just IDE/SATA instead of IDE/SATA/floppy), or maybe they just cost the same. . .
ereavis - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - link
"Test Setup" is a big missing for me. What are you calling an "Intel P55" on these charts or all the Intel P55 motherboards from $90-$240 the same performance?g725s - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Cool conclusion on first page. Keep it up!Rajinder Gill - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 - link
Some seem to like it while others are not impressed (check the firs page of comments). I'll probably do some kind of exec front page summary in the future.later
Raja
treesloth - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
FWIW, I like it. Interestingly to me, it's essentially the same layout and format that I use for my testing an analysis at work, so I actually feel sort of vindicated. :-)treesloth - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
FWIW, I like it. Interestingly to me, it's essentially the same layout and format that I use for my testing an analysis at work, so I actually feel sort of vindicated. :-)