Design and Functionality

One glance is enough to see one drawback and one advantage. The power connectors are placed inconveniently in the middle of the PCB, but the expansion slots are positioned properly. The PCI-E x16 slot is at a distance from the others, so however large the cooler of your graphics card may be, it won’t block the PCI and PCI Express slots. The graphics card does block the memory slot latches, though.

The TForce P965 has a three-phase CPU power circuit that includes ordinary and solid-state capacitors:

The chipset is cooled with large aluminum heatsinks:

Most of the connectors are gathered around the South Bridge. It’s good that the front-panel connectors are color-coded and that the mainboard has Power and Reset buttons. On the downside, the FDD connector is placed inconveniently, and there are only two fan connectors (except for the CPU one) which are not placed properly, either.

Parallel ATA is supported through a VIA VT6410 controller. Network and audio are implemented through Realtek RTL8110SC and ALC888, respectively. An LPT header is available on the mainboard, but the appropriate bracket is not included.

The mainboard looks good overall. It seems to have neither extraordinary advantages nor catastrophic shortcomings. To sum everything up, I offer you a list of specifications taken from the user manual to the TForce P965:

Biostar’s series of mainboards based on the Intel P965 Express chipset includes a similar model called Biostar TForce 965PT. Judging by photos and specs, it has only one significant difference – it uses a Realtek ALC883 audio codec. Besides that, it doesn’t claim support for quad-core CPUs, lacks a Windows Vista verification logo (although has a Vista Ready Hardware emblem), and lacks a ROHS compliance sign.

The PCB of the discussed mainboard has a surprisingly high revision, 5.0. The user manual also mentions revision 6.0 which comes with an ALC861VD audio codec.