PCB Design and Functionality

Biostar TP45 HP mainboard makes a very good first impression. It doesn’t look cheap or low-quality at all.

Almost all mainboards are the same. Even if you haven’t seen the real board or its picture, you can assume with quite a bit of certainty that there will be a CPU socket at the top and the memory DIMM slots nearby.  The chipset North Bridge is closer to the center of the board, and beneath are the expansion card slots. The South Bridge – if there is a South Bridge in this core logic set - is slightly to the right. Of course, the manufacturers always try to make their solution stand out among others in one way or another. They use different color textolite, connectors and ports, however, the best way is to implement a unique cooling system. Therefore, we usually start discussing the mainboard design peculiarities with the cooling. Although, not all the time. There are a few exceptions. Take, for instance, Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6: we started with its rear panel, because we have never come across 4 integrated network controllers before. And in case of Biostar TP45 HP, everyone asks one and the same question: what are those strange red things between the PCI Express x16 slots?

When we took a closer look at them, they turned out to be a set of jumpers. When we were talking about the top mainboards from the leading manufacturers, we may have forgotten that with two graphics cards installed into an Intel P45 Express based mainboard, PCI Express x16 slots switch to PCI Express x8 mode. We are used to these operational modes being switched automatically, however, it turned out that on some Intel P45 Express based mainboards they should be switched manually with a special dual-sided board. We have already seen it many years ago on Nvidia nForce4 SLI based boards. Biostar implemented it differently, using several jumpers that need to be reset in order to enable the second graphics card slot. It is a little inconvenient, however, you will have to do it once. If you are going to use two cards in Crossfire mode, then you don’t have to worry about it at all.

Space-Pipe chipset cooling system using on Biostar TP45 HP mainboard is pretty ordinary. It is a thoroughly made cooling solution using one heat-pipe.

The heatpipe starts at the bottom of the chipset North Bridge heatsink, just where it is supposed to:

It ends in the middle of the MOSFET heatsink on the processor voltage regulator. We believe Gigabyte engineers could actually take into account this simple and efficient solution of their Biostar colleagues.

As for the heatsink on the chipset ICH10 South Bridge, it does well without any heatpipes and without active cooling.