Introduction

Core 2 chipsets have been coming out thick and fast from Intel as of late. While there was sizeable gap between the launch of the P965 and P35 chipsets, there is now a grand total of 12 different chipsets from Intel alone offering different features and performance levels.

While we haven't officially heard about all of them just yet, P35, X38 and X48 are the big ones we have heard all about, and rightly so, because these have been the corner stone for Intel. And now we have NVIDIA in the market with its nForce 780i and 790i chipsets - we have a huge array to choose from.

But why stop at just these, after all, improvement is the name of the game, and Intel has tried to better themselves with every chipset and so far they have had reasonable success. Intel has thrown a new chipset into the fray to replace one of its aging components. P45 is set to be the new mainstream chipset from Intel to replace its aging P35 chipset by bringing some new features and support to the table.

For our initial tests, we have been handed two GIGABYTE motherboards based around this chipset, one at the top end of the spectrum and one for the mainstream marketplace. Today we test the Intel P45 Express based GIGABYTE EP45-DQ6 and EP45-DS3R.

Let's have a look, shall we?