After all, you’ll find very attractive X48 motherboards in the same price range with official 1600 MHz FSB support. We won’t be alone in suggesting that a $300 P45 board is going to be far too rich for a majority of folks. Of course, one is the EP45-DQ6, which initial estimates tag in the $300 range. However, the company is leading off with four. Gigabyte undoubtedly has many more P45 SKUs planned at various price points. The feature may very well go unused, but we like the option to protect sensitive financial information or work-related documents saved at home. What does a home user or enthusiast need with 2048-bit data encryption? Good question. Gigabyte is arming each of its P45 offerings with an Infineon Trusted Platform Module-a feature normally reserved for Intel’s Executive series business boards. IDT's PCIe bridge chip, responsible for driving the x4 PCIe slots and four GigE controllersĪlso worthy of note is the board’s official support for DDR2-1066 memory, an upgrade from the P35. Intel's P45 MCH, makes close contact with the copper cooling solution While a bottleneck is possible, chances are good that it’ll never be realized. The same goes for a pair of x4 expansion slots, even if someone adds a high-end SAS or 10 Gb Ethernet card. ![]() A Gigabyte representative correctly surmised that four Gigabit connections will rarely, if ever, be fully utilized. The switch uses those four lanes to enable the x4 expansion slots and quad Gigabit chips. Then, four PCIe lanes are routed to an IDT 89HPES16T7ZH PCI Express switch. Moving south, the JMicron SATA controller gets its own PCIe connection, as does the x1 expansion slot. When two graphics cards are installed, the P45 gives each x16 slot eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 connectivity-plenty for a CrossFireX configuration. Gigabyte’s workaround is intelligently implemented. That’s a bit of a math problem, considering the P45 offers 16 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 connectivity and the ICH10-R is still limited to six lanes of PCI Express 1.1. Grand total: 41 lanes of onboard expansion and five lanes populated by onboard components. There are four PCIe x1 Gigabit chips and the JM363 controller. ![]() It also includes two x4 links and a x1 expansion slot. The EP45-DQ6 has two PCI Express x16 graphics slots. Here’s where our interests really cranked into high gear. ![]() The user simply installs a monitoring utility and if a drive goes out, they’re instructed to replace it, whereby the array is rebuilt in the background. By default, the integrated RAID logic is configured to build RAID 1 arrays, so attaching a pair of drives automatically creates a backup configuration that Gigabyte’s product manager hopes takes the learning curve out of RAID storage. In other words, you attach a hard drive and it’s recognized. Because the SiI723s are hardware-based controllers, they don’t require drivers. Two Silicon Image SiI723 storage processors attach to the JM363 enabling two SATA ports each for a total of 10 ports. From there, attached to a single PCI Express x1 link, you’ll find a chip labeled Gigabyte SATA 2, which is really a JMicron JM363 PCIe-to-SATA II host controller. Intel’s ICH10-R I/O Hub enables six of the DQ6’s SATA 3 Gb/s ports. Perhaps more interesting is Gigabyte’s Smart Backup storage subsystem.
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