Although Intel is not expected to officially release the P45 Express chipset until next month, we have already had the privilege of testing the ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe earlier this month. The P5Q3 Deluxe was an impressive product offering excellent performance, stability, overclocking abilities and a feature list that is simply unmatched by many high-end motherboards. Possibly the only shortcoming of this new ASUS motherboard was its exclusive support for DDR3 memory, a memory type that users are still paying a fair price premium for.

The Intel P45 chipset is quite flexible in its memory support as it can be configured to work with either DDR2 or DDR3 memory. This being the case, we always expected that there would be a DDR2 version of the P5Q3 Deluxe and today we have that version, which is known simply as the P5Q Deluxe. Everything has remained very much the same, with the key change being the supported memory, our particular version does ditch the onboard WiFi feature.

An interesting feature of the P5Q3 Deluxe was the 3-phase power delivery system. The memory and north bridge each featured their own 3-phase power circuitry. The P5Q Deluxe on the other hand uses the more typical 2-phase design for both the memory and north bridge. This is the only real design change that we can see between the DDR2 and DDR3 versions of these high-end ASUS P45 motherboards. The P5Q Deluxe still retains all the special features, such as the Express Gate and the EPU-Six Engine, while Firewire, dual Gigabit LAN, 8-Channel Audio, eSATA, SATA RAID and CrossFire support is also present.

The P45 chipset 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.

Rather than copy and paste the bulk of the P5Q3 Deluxe review, we will just skip to the benchtesting. Given that the P5Q3 Deluxe and the P5Q Deluxe are virtually identical in terms of board design, features and BIOS, we will just skip these sections of this review. This was all covered in great detail when testing the P5Q3 Deluxe earlier this month, so for those of you who missed that review please check it out.

[ Photography ]