Intel P45 desktop chipset
Makes life more difficult for overclockers
4th September 2008 11:22 GMT
G45 introduces the new GMA X4500HD graphics core that we’ll be covering very soon in a comparison of desktop graphics, and G43 uses GMA X4500 without the HD suffix.
The 4 series uses the new ICH10/ICH10R southbridge. The 3 series was allied with ICH9/ICH9R, but it’s hard to find any substantial differences between the two generations. The two southbridges have the same levels of support for USB 2.0, LAN, 3Gb/s SATA and SATA RAID without a sniff of integrated Firewire or anything exotic such as 802.11n wireless.
3DMark06 Results
Longer bars are better
The most visible change in P45 lies in the PCI Express support for graphics as a single graphics card will run on 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 while two ATi graphics cards in CrossFire will get eight lanes of PCIe 2.0 each. That’s enough bandwidth to run CrossFireX with a pair of dual-GPU graphics cards - which is handy, as AMD has recently brought out the ATI Radeon HD 4850, 4870 and 4870 X2.
Although the PCIe support offered by P45 is a welcome enhancement over P35, it’s not as generous as the dual 16 lanes you get with X38 and X48. For that matter, P45 doesn’t add support for a new FSB or memory speed. We know full well that Penryn will have reached the end of the road at top-of-the-line CPU as soon as 'Nehalem' - aka Core i7 - is launched in conjunction with the 5 series of chipsets, so you might be wondering what’s so great about the P45.
That’s a very good question.
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Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core Processor (2.66GHz, 4x256kB, 4.8GT/s QPI, LGA 1336 Socket B)
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad Core Processor (3.4GHz, 6MB L3 Cache, 4x512KB L2 Cache, 2000 MHz Bus, Socket AM3)
Intel Core i5 750 Qaud Core Processor (2.66GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, 2.5 GT/s Bus, Socket H LGA1156)
Asus P7P55D Motherboard (Intel Socket H LGA1156, P55 Express, ATX, 16GB DDR3)
Asus M4A785TD-V EVO AMD 785G/SB710 Socket AM3 ATX Motherboard
