Biostar I945P-A7 (Intel 945P)

These days, more and more new motherboards built on the i945P chipset are emerging. Now the turn has come to second-rank manufacturers - a typical example is the Biostar I945P-A7 motherboard which will be the subject of our today's review.

The major feature of the board is in the two PCI Express slots, which in theory allows setting up a system with two video cards running in the nVidia SLI or ATI Crossfire modes. In fact, for high-end systems like that, in my view, in makes sense choosing a motherboard of a more eminent manufacturer. Because every new generation of Intel chipsets imposes increasingly rigid requirements to the compliance with the specifications as well as the thoroughness of the PCB design development. It often happens that second-rank manufacturers have no resources to create a powerful, high-quality and at the same time cheap motherboard.

And I945P-A7 has brought some unpleasant surprises: a complete failure at overclocking capabilities, and partial incompatibility to Intel 6?? processors. In particular, the board was running with a Pentium 4 660 in the "emergency" mode, i.e. the multiplier was set to 14 and could not be changed with any means.

On the other hand, boards on the base of the i945P by second-rank manufacturers are a good alternative to boards based on Intel's previous generation chipsets. So we'll be reviewing the Biostar I945P-A7 board just with this viewpoint in mind.

Biostar I945P-A7 Specifications

Package

We received an engineering sample for tests, so there is nothing to say regarding the package bundle:

Also, the board was packed into an "alien" box, one from a board built on the i945G chipset:

Nor the user's guide (a *.pdf file downloaded from Biostar's web site) promises a great number of components.

Biostar I945P-A7 Board Layout

Among the shortcomings of the board is the blocking of DIMM slots latches with a full-length video card installed in the first PCI Express slot.

Also, the main power connector is positioned inconveniently - near the north bridge. The additional 4-pin connector is positioned better - on the board's right-hand edge.

Near the processor socket, there is a 4-pin connector (JCFAN1) for a cooler. Besides it, there is also one more 3-pin connector: JSFAN2 - in the bottom left corner.

To cool the north bridge, a mid-sized radiator is used:

Under the north bridge, there are four 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules. They are partitioned into two groups with two slots in each. The first two slots refer to the first controller channel, with the other two to the second controller.

The board offers support for DDR2-400,533 and 667; and the maximum memory capacity makes 4GB.

There are two PCI Express x16 slots onboard (both with latches) which are meant for video cards.

This allows operating two nVidia video cards in the SLI mode at a time, and potentially - ATI Crossfire. The distribution of lines is standard (for the i945P chipset): to the first slot 16 lines of PCI Express are allocated, with 4 lines left to the second slot.

Besides the above listed slots, Biostar I945P-A7 uses three more "regular" PCI slots and two PCI Express x1 slots.

Expansion options

Biostar I945P-A7 uses the ICH7R south bridge with a radiator. Therefore, the board supports for 4 SerialATA II ports and allows merging disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1,5 and 10 (MatrixRAID).

Besides, the board's design provides installation of a dual-channel ParallelATA controller (most likely, ITE8211 or RAID ITE8212), but it is not welded on our board.

Therefore, to the two ParallelATA hard disks of the integrated controller you can add 4 more SerialATA II disks. Totally, 6 hard disks can be plugged in to Biostar I945P-A7.

Then, there are eight USB2.0 ports onboard. Four of them are on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in via brackets. Besides, Biostar I945P-A7 supports the other type of serial bus, the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). For that, there is an additional onboard VIA VT6307 controller made by VIA.

Therefore, the board offers support for 2 Firewire ports: one positioned on the rear panel, with the other plugged in via a bracket.

Then, Biostar I945P-A7 offers 8-channel audio - Intel High Definition Audio,with ALC882 used as the codec.

A couple of words on the network support: the board uses a RTL8110S LAN controller made by Realtek (connected to the PCI bus).

The board's rear panel is almost of standard configuration:

The only trait is the lack of the second COM port (the same PCB design is used for i945G-based boards with the integrated video core).

Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:

Biostar I945P-A7 has three jumpers: JCMOS1 - to reset the CMOS (near the south bridge), J1394PWR1 - for the Firewire power management, JKBV1 - to wake up the system on a pulse from the PS2 keyboard. Besides, near the south bridge there is the JCI1 connector to plug in a housing integrity sensor.

Now on to the BIOS settings.

BIOS

The BIOS of Biostar I945P-A7 is built on the Award BIOS Phoenix version.

The section dealing with memory settings contains only a standard set of latency timings - ("CAS Latency", "Precharge to Active"(Trp), "Active to precharge" (Tras), and "Active to CMD"(Trcd)).

The next parameter that affects the performance is setting the memory operating frequency.

So, the user gets all whatever divisors for the memory frequency: 1:2(DDR2-400), 2:3 (DDR2-533), and 5:6(DDR2-667).

It should be noted that the board refused to run with Kingmax DDR2-533 memory at DDR2-533 frequency. So we had to run all the tests with DDR2-533 noname modules made on Samsung chips. In fact, this issue is typical of the vast majority of i945P-based motherboards (there is no such issue with i915Pi925X-based boards).

Now move on to the section to do with the system monitoring.

The board displays the current temperatures for the processor, rotational speeds of all the two fans, as well as voltage levels. Besides, for the processor cooler the Smart Fan feature is accessible, which allows adjusting the rotational speed versus the processor temperature.

Note that the board has the feature for displaying system monitoring data on the POST screen:

Overclocking and stability

Prior to moving to overclocking, let's look into the power converter. It uses a 3-phase power scheme, in which there are four 3300 mkF and three 1500 mkF capacitors.

Now on to the overclocking features.

First off, Biostar I945P-A7 allows adjusting the system bus speed within 200 to 232 MHz in 1 MHz increments.

Of convenience is that you can enter the desired FSB value from the keyboard.

Secondly, Biostar I945P-A7 allows raising voltage on the processor (Vcore) by 5 and 15 percent.

Then, the advanced user can raise Vmem from 1.8V (nominal) up to 2.1V (in 0.1V increments).

Besides, there is a feature for adjusting the processor multiplier:

However, it proved unusable (perhaps, a BIOS flaw). In particular, with Pentium4 660 the system started up with the multiplier = 14, which prevented us from running comparative performance tests versus other boards built on i955Xi945P.

Now let's try the overclocking features in practice. Therefore, Biostar I945P-A7 flatly refused to overclock Pentium4 540.

Bundled to the board, there is the Biostar WarpSpeeder utility for programmatical overclocking, having an amusing GUI:

But in view of the poor overclocking capability, its practical use is minimum.

Performance

While determining the starting FSB speed, the board overstated it by 1 MHz.

In our test setup, we used the following hardware:

Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.

Now on to the gaming benchmarks.

Final Words

As is easy to notice, compared to motherboards built on i915P and i925X even such a value-level board like Biostar I945P-A7 looks quite attractive. In particular, in terms of performance it surpasses the previous generation of motherboards built on Intel chipsets. There is also the advantage at the expansion options due to support for the SerialATA II and the south bridge ICH7R.

As regards the competition of Biostar I945P-A7 versus other i945P-based models, the situation is not so bright. For instance, the board wouldn't run with Pentium4 660. Besides, the retail price and the precise list of bundle items are is still unknown.

From the viewpoint of the PC enthusiast, this board is absolutely not interesting because of its poor overclocking capabilities (quite probable this shortcoming will be fixed in the forthcoming versions of the BIOS).

Conclusion

• High stability and good performance level;
• Support for SerialATA IIRAID (4 channels; ICH7R);
• Integrated 8-channel audio and (Gigabit Ethernet) LAN controller;
• Support for USB2.0 (8 ports) and IEEE-1394 (Firewire, 2 ports).

• Partial incompatibility to Kingmax DDR2-533 memory modules;
• Partial incompatibility with Pentium4 6xx processors.

• Poor overclocking features;
• Unclear situation with the package bundle items.