Biostar TP35D2-A7 and TP35D3-A7 Deluxe Motherboard Review

Fri 2007-08-24 - Posted by Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

When most people think of Biostar, they usually think budget motherboards, and rightfully so, since the Biostar's products are often the cheapest on the market. However, does budget necessarily mean bad? Let’s find out. The Tech Report has just posted a review of the Biostar TP35D2-A7 and TP35D3-A7 Deluxe motherboards.

Here’s what they had to say:

“With the TP35D2-A7 tipping the scales at as little as $90 online, Biostar had to leave a few things on the table. Fortunately, few of those features will be missed. Support for Firewire and multi-GPU CrossFire configurations, for example, isn't really necessary on such an inexpensive board. We can even live with the fact that the vanilla ICH9 has only four SATA ports and lacks Native Command Queuing and RAID functionality.

Unfortunately, the D2's abysmal Ethernet performance is harder to ignore. Not only does the board'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.”

First, let’s disregard the TP35D3-A7 Deluxe, since no one is currently buying DDR3 setups anyways. For the money, the TP35D2-A7 could be a very decent option, if not for that very bizarre LAN-CPU utilization issue. Until they fix that problem, in the $90 range, you are better off with the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L.

Click here to read the full review.

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