Comments Locked

30 Comments

Back to Article

  • cuti7399 - Thursday, August 14, 2008 - link

    is this true?
  • 957004 - Thursday, May 22, 2008 - link

    so it mean i will no need to buy ASUS x48 MB?
  • Narg - Monday, May 19, 2008 - link

    $250 is way too much, especially for a low end chipset board. I just bought a board for $60 that does 100% of what I need for a new Vista-64 machine with Crossfire. The MB pricing has been going through the roof lately.
  • kjboughton - Saturday, May 24, 2008 - link

    We've just received an MSRP update direct from ASUS, expect to see this board selling for about $229 with the P5Q (DDR2) variant available for about $209.
  • Nihility - Thursday, May 15, 2008 - link

    the instant on technology Asus put on this thing?
    Some stripped down linux distro as I understand it
  • Egglick - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    After looking things over with the P35 added to the mix, I'm going to be completely honest here -- the P45 at any substantial premium is a load of crap.

    By my calculations, the performance difference between a P35 and P45 is 2-3% at most, and the majority of the time you're only talking about tenths of a percent.

    When you consider that P35 boards are selling for as low as $75 now (with several from Asus going for under $100), you'd have to be nuts to pay $225+ for a difference which is hardly even worth mentioning.


    Sure, you can save anywhere from 7-19 watts with the P45 (depending on the application), but you can save twice that by replacing one of your light bulbs with a compact florescent. Spend your money elsewhere.
  • hpram99 - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    "two RJ-45 1000GBps Ethernet ports"

    Oh my god! I must go out and buy a hundred of these, make a super switch out of them! That's incredible, are they going to do away with SATA now that Asus made Ethernet run 300x faster?
  • lopri - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    Well, actually I wish ASUS (and other board makers) made their board with ONE Intel Gigabit PHY, instead of two or four Marvell PHY. Heck, get rid of that EPU BS while you're at it.
  • hooflung - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    I want to get excited. I really do. But as an owner of a Gigabyte P965 DS3 I just can't get aroused. My e4300 still is clocking strong at 3.0ghz. There isn't enough speed to justify going .45nm just to hit 3.8 - 4.0ghz and also having to go to DDR3. Even if they release a DDR2 board its likely is it going to be worth buying a new board or just installing a 'beta' bios on my current setup if I did want to get a .45nm chip.

    Just seems Intel wants to go out with a bang and also have more unload options for their C2Ds when they switch platforms within the next year.

    If I was buying new, I'd be really tempted but good ol' faithful P965 is running 1 year strong on a mild OC 'according to today's standards of OCing.'
  • Stele - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    [quote]The P5Q3 may report the use of a 16-phase PWM but we know better. [/quote]

    Do we, really?

    [quote]Although ASUS design engineers have added a lot of extra chokes and MOSFETS, the overall capacity of the power delivery circuit remains comparable to their competitors' more modest 8-phase designs.[/quote]

    From the review we don't know what components Asus used in its PWM design (MOSFETs, drivers etc) - heck, we don't even know what PWM controller they have there. It could be the same ADP3198 4-phase controller Asus had been using for some time, or it could be a newer, improved one - especially considering that Analog transferred much of its CPU PWM controller range to ON Semiconductor late last year.

    We don't have figures from Asus engineers. We also did not examine the circuitry's layout, overally efficiency, transient response, peak and sustained load-handling capabilities ... nothing of the sort, yet we're prepared to come to a positive conclusion regarding the capabilities and quality of the circuitry, and indeed compare it with others. An educated guess, based on some evidence to back it up, would've probably been more appropriate. IMHO it's not exactly fair (or professional) to jump to such a conclusion with merely an assertion without any substantiation to support it. That's expected from readers who can only look at the product and play the armchair general, but not from reviewers who actually have the product and can (and should) do what they can to properly assess it for the benefit of said readers.

    As for the rest of the review, it was certainly interesting; however correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that ICH10/R is supposed to bring rather more to the table than just 2 more SATA ports plus AHCI capabilities for the non-R version. For instance, apparently a 10GbE MAC is integrated as well.

    However, as with the ICH9's integrated GbE MAC, many manufacturers may balk at having to use specific (particularly, i8256x) Intel PHYs in order to make use of that MAC, since it requires a PHY that supports Intel's GLCI/LCI bus. Instead, manufacturers may choose to provide the usual PCIe/PCI controllers that they've normally been using, to keep inventory and costs under control (such controllers can be used on AMD platform products, for example). Perhaps the same proprietary-PHY issues might plague implementation of ICH10's rumoured Wi-Fi capabilities as well... all in all, then, it does seem that as far as the end user of actual motherboard products is concerned, there would apparently be very little that's new with the ICH10. IMHO, Intel could've added more PCIe lanes, which would probably have been better appreciated.

    Speaking of PCIe lanes, that's probably one reason Asus chose to stick with USB for the wireless module. USB does the job well enough - if it ain't broken, why fix it? PCIe x1 is overkill and ICH10 is already in dire shortage of lanes, with 1 going to network (2 for dual-NIC motherboards), 1 or 2 going to PCIe x1 slots and just 4 left to go to the third graphics card x16 slot. With the abundance of USB ports that ICH9 and 10 provide, Asus probably figured that using one for the wireless module can't hurt. And if anything it's probably to do with inventory and ease of design as well, since Asus does make wireless USB adapters - you could use the same basic circuit design and fit it with a motherboard USB connector and external antenna interface - voila, wireless for motherboards.

    At least Anandtech did not help perpetuate the unconfirmed (and unlikely) rumour that ICH10 eliminates legacy ports like PS/2, parallel, serial, game/MIDI and so on - since those ports have little to do with the south bridge at all. These legacy ports connect to Super I/O chips, which on modern motherboards is also the H/W monitoring IC, and which in turn connect to the south bridge via the LPC interface. Thus the only way an ICH could completely remove support for legacy ports in current motherboard architectures would be to remove the LPC bus - which would also remove H/W monitoring as well as BIOS, unless it's part of Intel's force-forward plan to move to SPI for BIOS, a la RDRAM and PATA. That still leaves H/W monitoring high and dry though.

    On another note, as others here (especially Frumious1) have commented, it would be good to compared Intel chipsets from, say, P965 through P45 to see what improvements P45 brings. Perhaps some useful metrics would be performance tests for memory (read/write/copy/latency/overclockability), CrossFire (x8,x8 on P45 vs x8,x8 using a PCIe switch IC vs 16,x4 etc), disk and USB subsystems (read/write/copy/copy across ports), power consumption. Oh and please have all the tested boards participate in all tests, so that there's a complete comparison across the board.

    Admittedly, power consumption is the trickiest of them all because each generation of motherboards have different components and/or different features (e.g. one has FireWire while another doesn't, or one uses a FireWire controller from Agere while another uses one from VIA etc). Perhaps we could try disabling all such external controllers in BIOS and seeing if that makes a difference to power consumption (ie whether the option turns the controllers off or merely disconnects them) then, if turning them off does work, test the boards with all external options disabled. That, at least, minimises variables to board layout and CPU/MCH/ICH/RAM power circuitry subsystems - which would be useful metrics themselves. Just a suggestion!
  • dingetje - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    a p45 shootout article would be awesome.
    i won't buy asus anymore because of their EPU scam, but am very interested in the gigabyte and msi p45 offerings
  • Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    Asus = EPU scam, Gigabyte = dynamic energy saver scam. Unless your running your system at stock speeds, these features are useless, which brings out the following question? why are these 2 embedded in high end motherboards?
  • Hulk - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    I've written this before but a lot of people (like myself) might be considering this board as a big upgrade from an older board, like my current P5B Deluxe rig. Please include some "legacy" benchmarks so we can see if the performance improvements are worth the dimes.
  • hansmuff - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Certainly the P35 is mature by now and will be eclipsed, but I'd like to see a consideration of performance/$.
    A good P35 board is $120, 4GB of name brand DDR2-800 with an 8GB option (2x2GB) is $85. I can't even buy this P45 for those two combined, so DDR3 cost really comes into play.
  • Frumious1 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Well, you can't even buy any P45 boards right now, so it's a bit premature to discuss retail prices. This particular board is DDR3, so for budget-conscious buyers it would probably be a poor choice. ASUS will have a DDR2 model as well, and so will other companies. How much will those boards cost and how will they perform relative to, say, X38 DDR2 boards? Or P965, 975X, and P35 DDR2 boards? Those are all things we will hopefully examine in a future article. (Not being the motherboard reviewer, I can't make any promises. :))
  • Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    This board doesn't look "mainstream" to me for a 250 dollar board. I know that intel boards can go as high as 500 bucks a piece but a mainstream board is a stripped down of all the features such as dual ethernet, wireless build in, etc, and this board has it all, except maybe watercooling blocks. But anyway, just like the author stated, a major shift to a different socket type and processing power si drawing near, hopefully by the end of this year aka nehalem, which will pretty much make the x38/48 and p35/45 series become obsolete. So this board is definitely not futureproof. Having said that, most enthusiast/mainstream users will skip this product and look further ahead to the coming up nehalem processors. As for people looking to upgrade or building a new system, P35 can be had for less than $100 without sacrificing too much performance, or x38 for under 200 for crossfire purposes.
    P45 will only increase Intel's revenues without bringing anything new or worthy of attention to us, the consumers.

  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    $249 as an estimated price prior to launch is not indicative of the market as a whole. I imagine we'll see P45 boards at much more reasonable prices - they should only carry a small premium over P35 boards really.

    You can also see updated results with P35 performance in the charts now, and from that it's quite clear that P45 isn't a major leap forward. We'll have to wait for further tests on stuff like CrossFire, as that might show more of an advantage, but unless P45 comes in at a price lower than X38 it won't really be a huge chipset launch. Luckily, I expect we will see $150 and lower priced P45 boards - just probably not from ASUS. ;-)
  • Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link

    Wow, performance difference between p45 and p35 is so small it's scary. One might state that P45 is just a refresh of its older brother, which is not.
  • Frumious1 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Edit: *they* will hopefully examine. Whatever. I know that's what I want to see benchmarked.
  • goosemilk - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Does this board support Crossfire and SLi?
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Didn't bother to even read the article, did you?
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    See the conclusion. As always, SLI requires an NVIDIA chipset to work. This board does support CrossFire however - in 2x8 PCIe 2.0 configuration, which matches the bandwidth of 2x16 PCIe 1.x seen on implementations like AMD's earlier Xpress 3200 chipset. I seriously doubt doubling the PCIe bandwidth will improve performance all that much, so this looks to be a very good midrange option for CF users. (Note that my personal gaming rig runs X38 and 3870 CF.)
  • deruberhanyok - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    I've got a P965 board and was thinking of replacing it with a P35 board. I keep putting it off for one reason or another.

    IMO there's a handful of things about P45 that make it interesting to me and potentially worth a little extra wait, but I'm not sure how they'll pan out:

    * lower power consumption - curious to see how final silicon will compare to P35
    * ICH10 - I thought this is supposed to have a built in wireless-N NIC capability? If it does, hopefully someone will make use of it
    * PCI Express 2.0 - whether this really makes a difference over 1st gen or not, it's a nice marketing bullet point

    Also, seeing a new Analog Devices CODEC makes me smile. Looking forward to seeing info on Asus' mainstream version of this (which I'm guessing would be a P5Q-E or thereabouts), hopefully it will sit around the same price as the P5K-E.

    Thanks for the article!
  • npp - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    The board is a very strong offering from Asus, no doubt about that. I don't see any reasons to upgrade from something like P35, though, the differences in both performance and power consumption simply aren't large enough for me to justify it. Generally speaking, buying a relatively expensive product when a major platform shift is imminent can never be easily justified - like buying a Pentium 955EE just before the Core 2 Launch :]


    Continuing with the obvious "Nehalem" argument - I don't find it wise to recommend DDR3 today, either, just to see it bottlenecked by the antique FSB... Correct me if I'm wrong, but FSB 400 provides theoretical bandwidth of 12800 MB/s, which is easily surpassed by even a single DDR3-1800 module. Having ~3x that bandwidth sounds like a much more convincing argument for an upgrade for me :]
  • Gerbilhamster - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    hard to make a comparison
  • AmberClad - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    My ears perked up at the supposed support for 16GB of DDR2. Granted, 4GB dimms aren't exactly commonplace yet, but the theoretical ability to have 8GB with only two slots populated is pretty intriguing. I'm just thinking of all the apps I can leave in the background with all that spare memory available o_o.
  • Staples - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    In a few months, people will be thinking of upgrading from their P35 to the P45. I think for this reason the P35 should be included in every benchmark including the power consumption graph.
  • DigitalFreak - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    Only someone with more money than sense would upgrade from a P35 to a P45 board.
  • Egglick - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    I agree, but for different reasons. The P35 is much less expensive, and if performance is close enough, it could be a better choice until prices on the P45 drop. I personally find $250 for a motherboard to be unacceptable.

    The only reason I even read the article was to see how the two compared.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link

    A P35 comparison is forthcoming; Kris didn't have an appropriate board on hand for this article (and he's apparently running around in Asia right now).

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now