The P45 is the first and currently the only Eaglelake chipset, and it is Intel's latest weapon in their chipset arsenal, designed to support their upcoming Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors. These upcoming processors are designed to support a 1600MHz FSB (Front Side Bus), whereas most current processors use an 800MHz, 1066MHz or 1333MHz FSB. Like its predecessor, this new chipset also adds support for DDR3 memory, though DDR3-1333 is now official.

When it comes to features the P45 is certainly one of the most impressive chipsets that Intel has on offer and this is primarily due to the inclusion of the ICH10R south bridge. The X48 still remains the superior chipset, offering more PCI Express lanes and greater DDR3 memory support. However, the P45 does offer a number of improvements when compared to the P35 chipset. The P45 is built using a 65nm design process, where as the older P35 is based upon a 90nm design.

The P35 and even the older P965 chipsets were never all that good when it came to Crossfire support. These mainstream chipsets could only run one graphics card in PCI Express 16x mode, while the other was limited to PCIe 4x bandwidth which really hurt performance. This left multi-GPU users stuck with the more expensive X38 and now the X48 chipsets. Although ASUS did come up with a design to solve this issue which they featured on their more expensive models using the P35 chipset, the majority of P35 motherboards suffered from this lack of bandwidth.

Intel has now solved this issue by including digital switches which can share the PCI Express 16x bus amongst both slots, balancing the bandwidth. This is much like how the Nvidia nForce 750i chipset works, which should help Crossfire become even more competitive with SLI technology. The ICH10R south bridge still only supports six SATA ports, just as the ICH9R did, and the USB 2.0 support has not been improved either, though most will find that 12 ports are more than enough.

So the Intel P45 certainly delivers when it comes to features, and the chipset appears to be reasonably affordable when compared to previous high-end products, such as the X38. The only other question that needs to be addressed regards performance, how well does the P45 perform when compared to Intel’s existing P35, X38 and X48 chipsets, and what is the overclocking performance like? This review will certainly answer both these questions, but before we get that far, let’s take a moment to examine the test subject.

The ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe is an impressive looking motherboard and it is not just the looks that will impress, ASUS has really gone all out on this one (again). Set to be one of, if not the most extreme version of the P45 chipset from ASUS, the P5Q3 Deluxe has been outfitted with just about every possible feature. That being the case, let’s move on to check out this exciting new motherboard in more detail...