Introduction

GIGABYTE's portfolio of motherboards keeps getting larger and larger. It's no wonder they are amongst the top three motherboard manufacturers in the market today, right along with ASUS and MSI. While AMD has had its day in the sun, Intel has now taken off with a huge range of chipsets and processors, all of which have managed to make a big splash.

P45 is Intel's IT chipset. While P35 did start the revolution, it wasn't as well adopted as P45; its lack for true Crossfire support made it a pretty big disappointment and it was just an upgrade on the P965 chipset, which already worked perfectly. The X series chipsets were simply too expensive for the average users. While having true full speed Crossfire support, it wasn't affordable for a mid-range system. This is where P45 comes in.

P45 not only supports true Crossfire thanks to its twin x8 PCIe slots, but it also manages to support DDR2 and DDR3 along with the latest ICH10R Southbridge and PCI Express 2.0 support. The best thing is that all this falls into the mid-range PCs price point. Who could argue with that?

Today GIGABYTE has sent us their latest high-end offering, based on the P45 chipset. This baby is dubbed the EP45-Extreme and we will show you why soon.