Biostar TPower I45

Verdict: An incredible blend of overclocking and innovation at a bargain price.

Many readers may not be familiar with the Biostar brand, because the company has had very poor distribution in the UK.

Like most of the mid-price LGA775 motherboards in this Labs test, the TPower I45 is based on the Intel P45 chipset, which means it can support two ATI graphics cards in CrossFire. There are four DIMM sockets for up to 16GB of DDR2, 12 USB 2 ports and six RAID-capable S-ATA II ports. The board's layout is particularly good - all the S-ATA II ports are mounted parallel with the PCB, while the Northbridge and VRM heatsinks (which are linked by a heatpipe) are positioned a sensible distance from the CPU socket. The Southbridge is cooled by a small heatsink, while an extra heatsink and fan can be mounted on the VRM heatsink if you plan on doing some serious overvolting.

The power and reset switches have also been placed in sensible positions, and there's a dual-purpose two-digit LED display. This displays POST codes when the PC is powering up, and shows the temperature of CPU core 0 once it's up and running. This is the first time we've seen a motherboard with this sort of dual-purpose display, and Biostar should be commended for this innovation.

At its default BIOS settings, the TPower I45 was one of the slowest motherboards in the Labs test. In contrast, it proved to be a superb overclocker, and was easily able to overclock our test CPU to its air-cooled maximum of 3.66GHz. As a result, it achieved excellent benchmark results. In the maximum stable FSB test, with the Northbridge boosted by 0.3V, the FSB by 0.6V and the CPU PLL to 1.8V, the TPower I45 achieved an incredible 555MHz, making it one of the most overclockable motherboards ever made. The only downside is that the BIOS takes a bit of getting used to, as you have to adjust the vcore, DDR2, Northbridge and VTT voltages incrementally. However, it calculates and displays the absolute value for you.

Until recently, you had to spend at least £120 to acquire a really good overclocking motherboard, so for just under £95, the innovative TPower I45 is a real bargain.