Intel P-45

The Intel P45 is the leader in this lineup. Asus was the first one to roll out its collection of motherboards based on Intel P45 chipset. In addition, at the time of writing, Asus has a complete series called P5Q. I reviewed two boards the Asus P5Q Deluxe and the Asus P5Q3 Deluxe and I was blown away with what the P45 in Asus hands is capable of!

The P45 Express chipset comes with PCI Express 2.0 capability. As before, if used single, you get a 16-lane interface and if you use both slots for GFX, you get 8-lane on each of the two PCI Express slots.The P45 Express supports a maximum front-side bus speed of 1333 MHz. this means CPU with front-side bus speed of 1600 MHz will not fit. Therefore, with the exception of Intel QX9775 and Intel QX9770, all current Intel CPUs including the 45nm-based processors will work fine.

Another well-known feature that has been present for quite some time on recent Intel chipsets is the Matrix Storage technology. Once optical drives with SATA interface are mainstreamed, the last remaining Primary PATA/IDE port will be forgotten as well. The Matrix Storage allows external SATA drives connected through the special eSATA ports to be a part of the internal SATA RAID array(s).One of the interesting things to be seen on the Asus P5Q Deluxe and Asus P5Q3 Deluxe was the EZ Backup feature. This feature translates directly to the Intel’s original feature called Rapid Recover Technology. User can simply copy the entire system drive’s image to backup hard drive and if there is ever a need to restore system, this technology will simply restore the image from the backup hard drive to the system drive.Now, for the memory architecture, DDR2 is native-supported at 800 MHz and DDR3 is clocked at 1066 MHz. One thing to note is that if DDR3 is the memory architecture then the total possible memory installable is reduced to 8 GB instead of the 16 GB in DDR2 mode. Of course, we are using a 64 Bit OS when talking a memory size beyond 3 GB. Using DDR2 under dual-channel interleaved, the maximum transfer rate achievable is 6.4 GB/second + 6.4 GB/second = 12.8 GB/second. Similarly, using DDR3 the maximum transfer rate is 8.5 GB/second + 8.5 GB/second = 17 GB/second. The "Flex Memory Technology" and "Turbo Memory" are two memory related technologies also worth mentioning here. Flex Memory or Flexible Memory allow RAMs modules of different sizes (Gigabytes/Megabytes) to installed in same channel and still allow dual-channel mode. The Turbo Memory is somewhat similar to Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost technology, but rather than having to attach a USB device, Turbo Memory features a NAND flash memory module(s) installed directly on the motherboard.