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Written by Vladimir Dimitrijevic
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Monday, 02 February 2009 |
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Page 2 of 3
BIOS
BIOS of this motherboard is signed by AMI. Usually first version of BIOS on every BIOSTAR motherboard isn’t without bugs. Although we had some minor problems with first version of BIOS for TPower X58, second official version ironed out most of them but one irritating bug remained. But before we explain you what is the problem we need to describe you one neat option that TPower X58 has. This motherboard comes with application named “OC Tweaker II” that is used for overclocking of system from operating system without need for restart besides usual functions like BIOS update and control of fan speeds. This is not one of those new and fantastic features but it works and what is more interesting if you have graphics card signed by BIOSTAR in your system (plugged in TPower X58) you can overclock it also with this application. It is possible to change voltage settings for all vital motherboard components, change CPU (QPI) frequency and profile making. We already encountered V8, V10 and V12 profiles for BIOSTAR motherboard but V6 and V15 are new profiles included with this version of OCTII. And now about that bug. When we overcloked CPU sometimes after restart we couldn’t enter BIOS settings but keyboard was functioning normally. After power down/up everything worked as it should so we expect that even this bug will be eliminated in next BIOS revision but even if BIOSTAR doesn’t eliminate this bug it is not fatal problem but more irritating annoyance.
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BIOS itself has nice and logical menu organization. All overclock options can be found under O.N.E. section. Lot of attention is paid to memory settings so it is possible to change latencies for each memory channel separately. This can be very useful if you have different DDR3 memory modules. In this BIOS is integrated popular MemTest86+ in 2.01 version that is optimized for DDR3 memory (obviously). Default voltage for CPU can be increased for +1.26V in 0.02V increments – more than enough even for serious overclock. Maximal CPU VTT voltage is 1.9V while CPU PLL can be set in a range from 1.8 to 2.4V. Power for memory can be set from minimal 1.5V to maximum of 2.76V in 0.02V increments. Although we like to set memory voltage to high values for maximum performance achievements, we must say that Intel doesn’t recommend usage voltages higher then 1.65V because it can damage your CPU. Even for very serious (competitive) overclock these are more than enough. NorthBridge can be set up to 1.72V and SouthBridge up to 2.1V while QPI PLL can be set in range from 1.1 to 1.7V in 0.01V increments.
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Overclock
Our Core i7 940 CPU was stable at 3850MHz and 1.42V with HT disabled, and with HT enabled it was exactly 3.9GHz on same voltage. Of course this doesn’t mean that QPI at 180MHz is limit of BIOSTAR TPower X58 motherboard but simply limit of our test CPU. Motherboard can operate even on QPI on 199MHz and we tested this with lower CPU multiplier. Every MHz above 199 resulted in unstable OS and all applications for stability testing detected faults. Motherboard didn’t heat up too much even during overclock.
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MotherBoards 
