Layout

As soon as we unpacked the BIOSTAR TPower X58 motherboard it was clear that we are dealing with serious product. Packaging itself is nothing special and it is not luxurious in any way, but this cannot be counted as fault because there is everything needed in the box. When we took motherboard in our hands first thing that caught our eye has good layout and massive copper painted aluminum cooling profile with copper heat pipes. Layout is that good that we couldn’t find any major fault but the place for floppy drive cable :) Seriously, only really problematic position has clear CMOS jumper that can be found at the right side between SATA and power connector. Even this fault in layout is conditional because it can be noticed only if SLI or CrossFire graphics card configuration is used. If you need to use long graphics cards, you can put to good use bottom PCI-E 16x slot that is better to use in SLI or CrossFire system because of cooling of chipset and there will not be problems with clear CMOS jumper. Some users will complain about only 3 fan connectors on motherboard but this problem is also conditional.

All capacitors are solid type which is standard for high-class motherboards. After a thorough inspection of BIOSTAR TPower X58, we noticed that CPU power unit is 12 phase while memory power filtration is 2 phase unit. This shouldn’t surprise you since Core i7 uses a lot of power especially if it’s overcloked. Power drop wasn’t noticeable even when we tortured out overclocked test CPU with multi Prime95 (eight processes) but there were moments when voltage was raised for 0.015V. Two character display on PCB was very useful during overclock, and we always knew if we gone too far with frequency or voltage. Power and Reset buttons are nicely positioned and always welcomed on this kind of motherboards that are often used for serious overclock. There is enough space around CPU socket for mounting even very large CPU coolers. The backplate is consisted of: eight USB 2.0 ports, two LAN connectors, two eSATA connectors, one FireWire and one S/PDIF connector. Realtek ALC88S is one of the best 7.1 integrated sound solutions so we have nothing to complain in that area also.