The Intel® P45 boards will sport a die shrink of the onboard components to 65nm as opposed to the previous 90nm standard. This die shrink would lead us to expect less power consumption as well as improved power efficiency. The P45 also offers official support for PCIe 2.0 with more adaptable lanes to help better support the use of multiple GPUs based on the CrossFire™ architecture. The P45 based boards will feature the new ICH10 series southbridge, which is extremely close in its feature set to its ICH9 brethren, but the primary difference between the two is the ICH10 series has removed LPT and legacy PATA support entirely. While not officially offering support for the new 1600 MHz FSB processors we have it on good authority that most of the P45 boards will support these chips.

Armed with this information and a yearning to be one of the first to review this new and extremely tempting product we prevailed upon our friends at ASUS. They were kind enough to send us one of their P5Q Deluxe editions of this board. The P5Q Deluxe is one of ASUS's top of the line P45 based boards, and like the majority of these boards being released, utilizes DDR2 in lieu of the newer DDR3. We can only surmise this is to spare the consumer the substantial cost of the newer memory while still maintaining above average performance. It is our plan to directly test this board against its X48 counterpart; either fuelling the fires for compelling arguments or helping to extinguish them.