Performance

• Biostar TP35D2-A7 ver. 5.0 mainboard;
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU (1.86GHz, FSB 266MHz, 2MB, Conroe-2M, rev. B2);
• 2x1024MB Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D;
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card;
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HDD, ST3320620AS, 7200rpm, 16MB, SATA 320GB;
• Zalman CNPS9700 LED CPU cooler;
• SunbeamTech Nuuo SUNNU550-EUAP PSU (550W).

To cool down pretty warm chipset North Bridge heatsink we installed an additional fan on top of it.

Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard booted without any problems the first time.

During boot-up the board reports the current processor frequency, FSB frequency, clock multiplier, number of cores, supported technologies, memory capacity, frequency and work mode. It is very convenient that by pressing F9 you can actually select any boot-up device other than the one set in the BIOS. This is pretty wide-spread feature of contemporary mainboards, although I have to admit that I was surprised to see nothing like that by abit IP35 Pro, which we gave very good review some time ago.

And after that I was pretty misled by the info available on Biostar’s web-site. As you can see from the screenshot above, the BIOS version on the mainboard that arrived in our lab was a little old and dated back to 06.25.07, while there was a newer P35BA521.BST version posted on 08.03.07 on the company web-site. Of course, I immediately reflashed the BIOS, but it turned out that the digits “521” in the name of the file stand for the date. The BIOS I reflashed appeared to be even older, dating back to 05.21.07. Luckily, I was cautious enough to save the original BIOS with the help of WinFlash utility, since Biostar TP35D2-A7 has no integrated tools for BIOS saving.

Later on the confusion cleared. It turned out that Biostar launched a new web-site recently, that is why the upload dates and the dates in the BIOS file-names were different. So, make sure that you identify the BIOS date by the name, not by the upload date.

At first I decided not to change anything and test Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard with the BIOS version that was posted on Biostar’s web-site. One of the differences I noticed was the absence of Smart Fan Option, that anyway didn’t work or disappeared from the newer BIOS. Also the older BIOS didn’t know to change Command Rate 1T/2T settings.