Biostar TF7050-M2

Testing Methods:

With the exception of our subsystem testing, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and an endless loop of Far Cry loop if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Systems:

• Biostar TF7050-M2 (Nvidia GeForce 7050PV/nForce 630a)
  
• MSI K9AGM2 (AMD 690G/SB600);
  
• MSI G965MDH (Intel G965/ICH8R);

You may consider using a 2.6GHz 5000+ 65nm AMD Athlon X2 processor against a 1.8GHz Intel E4300 somewhat unfair, but they are very similarly priced. We haven't tried to match an "entire sub-system cost", but the motherboards are almost in the same price range due to low cost integrated chipset, even though the MSI G965MDH is still slightly more expensive but offers fewer features. The G35 is due out soon with a a comparable feature set to both the Nvidia GeForce 7050PV and AMD 690G, but is also cheaper than the G965, which should make it far more competitive. Obviously, when that arrives sometime this quarter we will compare them all in due course.

NOTE: Since we started testing for this review the price of the Core 2 Duo E4400 came down to roughly the same price as the E4300, so you can expect a bit more (200MHz) performance for the same buck.