Biostar I945P-A7 Motherboard Review

A few months ago, Bjorn3D brought you an overview of some of the newest products from Intel, including the 945 mainboard chipsets. Shane provided a nice table summarizing Intel's newest chipsets in that overview.

Today, we bring you our first review of a retail 945P motherboard courtesy of Biostar. The I945P-A7 is currently Biostar's sole Intel 945P-based motherboard. It only offers a little more than a standard 945P board, though. Biostar added an additional PCI Express slot that it calls PCI Extreme (PCI-EX). Unfortunately, it's not exactly the SLI goodness you get from other motherboards equipped with dual PCI Express x16 slots - it's not meant for  gaming. However, using the two slots in tandem does require installing identical SLI-supporting NVIDIA-based video cards and drivers that support SLI and running it all under Windows XP. The PCI-EX slot operates as an x4 PCI Express slot, and the bridge connecting the two cards is required as it is with standard SLI. Basically, it seems to be a non-gamers SLI but on a mainboard featuring an Intel chipset.