Some of you may be thinking it be wise to hold out for P45 motherboards to start flooding the market before making the splash with a new platform upgrade; whether it be because of the extensive features spotted across several pre-release P45 boards on the web recently, or in the hopes that it will drive prices down on boards running older chipsets (P35/X38).

However, our friends at bit-tech have acquired some rather interesting information relating to the overclocking characteristics of the P45 chipset which will likely frustrate many enthusiasts out there, depending on what sort of results they're expecting from the new boards.

After spending time today talking in depth to a couple of MSI's P45 engineers and considerably more to Tony Leach from OCZ Technology, who spends a lot of time QAing BIOSes for companies like Asus, DFI and MSI, it looks like overclocking is going to become an increasingly more complicated art with the release of Intel's P45 chipset, as it mirrors many of the tweaks the current high-end X48 chipset offers.

If you want to buy and overclock on an Intel P45 board, Leach believes that you must learn how to use:

* GTL Reference Voltages
* CPU VTT and its relation to GTLs
* Clock Skews
* CPU PLL Voltages

This is because we've reached such a stage with the front side bus that the frequencies are getting easily out of sync. You can't just throw voltage at things any more - that will only get you so far.

You can find the full article here, it's a highly interesting read!