(New) Biostar Tpower X58

[Mr Vain]

First Pictures

Quote

The TPower X58

Rather unexpected, details of Biostar's X58 has made its way online thanks to Matbe and we're surprised with regards how good this board looks. Biostar has recently had some fame thanks it it's TPower I45 motherboards based on the P45 chipset, but it seems like they've taken things to the next level with the TPower X58.

Although Biostar has gone with a fairly clean design, all the features are there such as six memory slots, three x16 PCIe 2.0 slots as well as a single x1 PCIe and two PCI slots. Around the back the board has what appears to be two PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two eSATA ports, a FireWire port, dual Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

The board also has six SATA connectors, an IDE connector and even a floppy connector for those that cares. Furthermore it has headers for another four USB 2.0 ports and an additional FireWire port as well as power and reset buttons and a debug LED display. Biostar has also gone for heatpipe cooling for the chipset and the board should have 12-phase power regulation that puts it right up with the big boys in the motherboard market.

It really looks like Biostar has made good use of the ex Abit engineers now working for the company, as this board almost looks like it could've been made by Abit. We're hoping that this board will be a bit cheaper than the ?300 price point most X58 boards seems to be hovering around at the moment, but we're going to have to wait a little bit longer to find out about that.

With ex Abit engineers now onboard, we might be in for some real excellent Biostar boards.

Specs

TPOWER X58 Hardware Specs

CPU

Support Intel socket 1366 Nehalem Core i7 Extreme/ Core i7 45nm processors
Support Intel QPI (Quick Path Interfase) up to 6.4GB/s transfer rate

Memory
Support 6-DIMM DDR3-2000(OC)/1600/1333
Support Tri-Channel up to 192bit data bandwidth

Chipset

Intel X58 / ICH10R chipset
Support Dual PCIE X16 slots
Support both SLI and CrossfireX dual graphics technology

Expansion Slots
2 x PCIE X16 slots
1 x PCIE X4 slots (3rd PCIE X16 slot)
1 x PCIE X1 slots
2 x PCI slots

eSATA
2 portseSATA2 up to 3.0Gb/s data transfer rate
Support SATA RAID 0/1

SATA
6 ports SATA2 3.0Gb/s

LAN
Dual GbE

IEEE1394
Support 2 ports IEEE1394a by Ti 43AB22

Audio
Support 8+2 channel HD Audio by ALC888S
Support optical S/P DIF audio interface
Support coaxial S/P DIF audio interface

 

[SunnyD]

It looks like a pack or starbust or skittles.

 

[nerp]

Biostar has some yucky color schemes but their boards have been ROCK solid as of late. I love my 780G board and I see their p45 boards kicking butt all around.

 

[XMan]

Six memory slots?

Are two for DDR2?

 

[Quiksilver]

Originally posted by: XMan
Six memory slots?

Are two for DDR2?

Where have you been? It's for Tri-Channel DDR3....



Also you coulda just bumped the X58 for the masses thread :\

 

[nerp]

Originally posted by: XMan
Six memory slots?

Are two for DDR2?

In short, the powers behind the great upgrading conspiracy realized that by forcing everyone to buy THREE sticks of memory instead of just TWO, they could make more money! See, if you DESIGN the architecture to force people to buy three instead of two, you've essentially guarenteed everyone will follow suit!

j/k of course. But it does come across as a major "doh!"

 

[XMan]

Originally posted by: nerp

Originally posted by: XMan
Six memory slots?

Are two for DDR2?

In short, the powers behind the great upgrading conspiracy realized that by forcing everyone to buy THREE sticks of memory instead of just TWO, they could make more money! See, if you DESIGN the architecture to force people to buy three instead of two, you've essentially guarenteed everyone will follow suit!

j/k of course. But it does come across as a major "doh!"

My stuff is plenty fast for what I need so I haven't been paying attention to architecture as closely. I've been more interested in usability/feature additions . . . HDAV1.3, stuff like that.

 

[Absolution75]

This is a very very attractive board for me. Nice work, I may bite.


Hows Biostar's reputation with support/rma's?