ASUS P5Q Deluxe Review :: P45 Chipset features

• 65 nanometer process
• FSB 1333 Support
• Memory support up to DDR2-800, DDR3-1066MHz officially
• ICH10R
• PCI Express Generation 2.0 connectivity

ASUS says their P45 chipset motherboard supports Intel’s QX9770 CPU which has a 1600MHz FSB. Intel says their P45 chipset does not officially support the 1600MHz FSB. That is why motherboards based upon the P45 chipset don’t officially support the new FSB. ASUS as well as other companies are welcome to tune the motherboards to support the CPU.

DDR3 support is available to the P45 chipset, as well as the more common DDR2 memory support. ASUS states that their motherboard supports DDR2-1200. Officially, the P45 chipset supports DDR2-800, with some manufacturers supporting DDR2-1066, but ASUS takes it a step further by supporting DDR2-1200. DDR2-1200 offers as much as 19.2GB/second of memory bandwidth to the system.

ATI and NVIDIA are fighting for the graphics card dollar in many ways including trying to sell more than one graphics card for a given system. ATI’s solution is called Crossfire and is available on all Intel motherboard chipsets with more than one PCI Express x16 slot. All that is required to run CrossFireX on a motherboard is two PCI Express x16 slots, and a Crossfire bridge to connect the cards. The ASUS P5Q supports up to two cards in Crossfire mode.

Intel’s P45 chipset supports PCI Express 2.0 standard. PCI Express 2.0 offers up to 8GB/second of bandwidth between the expansion slot card and the motherboard; double that of the first generation PCI Express standard. When using two ATI video cards in Crossfire mode, the P45 chipset splits the x16 lane into two x8 lanes, offering the same bandwidth to each video card as PCI Express Generation 1.0 x16 slots.

ASUS’s ExpressGate is a new feature worthy of mention that was also found on their P5E3 Premium Wi-Fi@AP. This feature runs a Linux OS right out of the BIOS. If you want to go onto the Internet without Windows installed this allows you to download drivers, surf the WWW and other things without installing an OS.

Here’s ASUS’s webpage on the features of their P5Q Deluxe board.