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Targeting a motherboard for budget offering is a difficult task because when cutting costs, features tend to get the axe as well. With the
Biostar TP35D2-A7 motherboard price "only" around USD $100, Biostar had to leave a few things on this Intel motherboard. Since Firewire Support and multi-GPU CrossFire configurations is not really necessary on such an inexpensive motherboard, Biostar choosed to remove those feature from this Biostar motherboard. We can even live with the fact that the vanilla Intel ICH9 has only four SATA ports and lacks Native Command Queuing and RAID functionality. With Intel's entire ICH9 lineup lacking "parallel" ATA support, Biostar is forced to farm out IDE duties to an auxiliary chip from Marvell.
Unfortunately, the Ethernet performance of Biostar TP35D2-A7 motherboard is harder to ignore. Not only does the motherboard's PCI-based Gigabit Ethernet chip offer throughput that falls well short of the competition, its CPU utilization eclipses 40% with a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor. Poor networking performance of this motherboard is really the only glaring problem with the Biostar TP35D2-A7 motherboard, though.
The performance itself is otherwise competitive with Intel P35 motherboards that cost twice as much, and that's pretty impressive all on its own. With a decent array of overclocking and tweaking options in the BIOS,
Biostar TP35D2-A7 motherboard is a solid budget board.
Biostar TP35D2-A7 motherboard specification :
- Processor : Intel LGA775 processors (45nm ready -- Wolfdale and Yorkfield)
- Chipset : Intel P35 / ICH9
- FSB : 533/800/1066/1333 MHz
- Memory : 4 x DDR2 (533/667/800 MHz) up to 8 GB
- Audio : 8-channel Intel High Definition Audio (Azalia) -- Realtek ALC888 codec
- Form Factor : ATX (30.5cm x 24.4cm)
- AGP/PCI/PCIe x16/PCIe x4/PCIe x1 : 0/3/1/1/1
- USB/FireWire/Serial/Paralel : 6(6)/0/1/0
- PATA/SATA : 1/4
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