Computex 2008: Intel P45 launches - zillions of new motherboards spotted

Posted at: 6:26am 4th June 2008 by Clive Webster in Taipei

The last of the LGA775 chipsets has been launched - we check out what Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Foxconn and others are going to be offering

P45 is being touted as the most important chipset release of the year, and every manufacturer wants a piece of the action. Richard Stewart, UK Marketing Manager for MSI, was on hand to offer an explanation. 'Everyone's excited about P45 as the P-series of Intel chipsets takes such a large market share. Therefore it's really important to get it right first time." Almost all the motherboard manufacturers have gone to town with eye-catching additions to their premium P45 boards, and we've shot a selection of those that were on display at Computex, Taiwan.

P45 is the last LGA775 chipset, and so the motherboard manufacturers know it has a huge potential audiece - anyone with a perfectly good Core 2 CPU. The chipset includes a range of modern features. It's available in both DDR2 and DDR3 flavours, includes PCI-E 2.0 and support for dual graphics (though currently only CrossFire is supported). Intel has also added support for Turbo Memory (codename Robson) which caches data from regularly used applications in a dedicated chunk of flash memory connected to the P45 Northbridge.

P45 is joined, as usual by an integrated graphics sibling, the G45, which Intel claims has "a new graphics core that's 3x faster than the [previous] G3x-series". There's also the cheaper P43 and G43 chipsets which feature fewer PCI-E lanes, so dual graphics isn't an option.

MSI
MSI has six P45 (and deriviative) motherboards at launch, with two more designs in the pipeline. The first Combo board has six memory sockets, allowing support for either DDR2 or DDR3 on the same board while MSI couldn't tell us much about the second.

MSI was keen to explain that it had used premium materials in its premium P45 boards, including the DrMOS VRM and power management technology, High-C capacitors and new CircuPipre Northbridge heatsink designs (the P45 Platinum features a palm leaf-like heatsink using six heatpipes). MSI showed us a demo where the VRMs on the new P45 Platinum ran almost 20 degrees C cooler than those of a previous generation VRM cooler.

MSI has also introduced a motherboard with a Northbridge waterblock for the first time - the P45 Diamond. This block passes the liquid through it twice to maximise cooling. Stewart told us that the board will come with tubes, and with connectors that will fit any water-cooling kit.

Gigabyte
Gigabyte is also innovating with its P45 boards, with the GA-EP45-EXTREME using a heatsink so large that it looks like an expansion card and has to be screwed to the back of your case. The large copper heatsink is designed to conduct coolness into the PC case, helping to keep the temperatures of CPU and its cooler down. John Hung, Managing Director UK/Ireland for Gigabyte, also pointed out that the primary PCI-E graphics slot had moved away from this large heatsink and the CPU so as to avoid freezing when using liquid nitrogen with the GA-EP45-EXTREME.