Biostar is one of the better known manufacturers of mainboards in the industry. With more and more users looking for mainstream mainboards for their Intel P55 systems, the Biostar TPower I55 should fit the bill.

In terms of features, the TPower I55 comes with a 12 phase power circuitry and 3 phase for 4 DIMM slots. It also uses higher grade components known as DURA-MAX. As with all Intel P55, it supports 2 card CrossFire or SLI. On top of that, this mainboard comes wit Dual GbE, 7.1 ch audio, debug LED, BIO-V voltage measuring points, 1394. It also has a energy saving technology known as G.P.U. With G.P.U (Green Power Utility). G.P.U is a BIOS implementation of Power phase shift design. With the power leds on the PCB, you can see the power phase changes with system load. For overclockers, you can o/c the board using O.M.G (Overclocking Matrix Genic). The board also offers the Toverclocker windows based oc utility which helps you to o/c within windows.

Software wise, it comes with T-Power. It is a utility for Biostar motherboards and  VGA cards. It connects hardware and software management tools brings OC Tweaker, Bio-Watch, eHot-Line,GPU (Green Power utility), BIOScreen and BIOSTAR Flash into one single interface. It can also save your overclock profiles, change the tuning mode v3,v6,v9,v12,v15. There is also a 1 click for auto oc for mainboard and VGA.

Performance wise, this board has mixed results when compared with other makes of Intel P55 mainboards. In some tests, it seems slower but in some, it is faster than most. In terms of overclocking, this board has a range of voltage levels for you to choose from. (See BIOS Screen shots). This board is easy to overclock. We just set the BCLK to 200MHz and Multiplier to 20X and XMP is selected for DDR3-2000. The board boots up and the voltages are all auto set to power it at 4GHz. We ran 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage without any issues. We tried raising the voltages of the CPU to 1.43v and Vtt to 1.30, we can enter 21x200 but it isn't stable at 4.2GHz.

In conclusion, the Biostar TPower I55 is a straightforward board with no frills. It does not come with expensive 2oz copper, gold plated dimms slots nor SATA3 support. What it has is simply a workable, down to earth designed mainboard that works. Although it only has 2 PCIe full length slots, how many people will run 3 card SLI or CrossFire on a Intel P55? Seriously, if you never thought of running a 3 way SLI/CF, this board is definitely worth considering.

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Pros

• T-Power utility
• Clean layout

Cons

• No Powered eSATA ports
• No SATA3
• Dual PCIe slot, no 3 way SLI or CFX

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.