Biostar I945P-A7 (Intel 945P)
Expansion options
Biostar I945P-A7 uses the ICH7R south bridge with a radiator. Therefore, the board supports for 4 SerialATA II ports and allows merging disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1,5 and 10 (MatrixRAID).
Besides, the board's design provides installation of a dual-channel ParallelATA controller (most likely, ITE8211 or RAID ITE8212), but it is not welded on our board.
Therefore, to the two ParallelATA hard disks of the integrated controller you can add 4 more SerialATA II disks. Totally, 6 hard disks can be plugged in to Biostar I945P-A7.
Then, there are eight USB2.0 ports onboard. Four of them are on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in via brackets. Besides, Biostar I945P-A7 supports the other type of serial bus, the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). For that, there is an additional onboard VIA VT6307 controller made by VIA.
Therefore, the board offers support for 2 Firewire ports: one positioned on the rear panel, with the other plugged in via a bracket.
Then, Biostar I945P-A7 offers 8-channel audio - Intel High Definition Audio,with ALC882 used as the codec.
A couple of words on the network support: the board uses a RTL8110S LAN controller made by Realtek (connected to the PCI bus).
The board's rear panel is almost of standard configuration:
The only trait is the lack of the second COM port (the same PCB design is used for i945G-based boards with the integrated video core).
Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:
Biostar I945P-A7 has three jumpers: JCMOS1 - to reset the CMOS (near the south bridge), J1394PWR1 - for the Firewire power management, JKBV1 - to wake up the system on a pulse from the PS2 keyboard. Besides, near the south bridge there is the JCI1 connector to plug in a housing integrity sensor.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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CPU & Memory:
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