What to expect ...

The newest Intel P45 chipset is said to be perfect for overclocking, although not many confirm. Most results we have seen with the P45 are quite good, but the question remains if the boards sent out to top benchers are giving representative results for their retail brothers and sisters. Our friends over at Overclex already tested a series of P45 motherboards and they had a mixed experience. Some boards could reach 600+Mhz with ease, while others struggled to get to 550Mhz.


(c) Overclex.com and Pt1t

One of the boards which easily breached the 600Mhz barrier is from Biostar, this might be only obtainable with the hand-picked version.


(c) IxtremeTek

This is an air cooled result; pretty impressive!

There is a lot to do around the P45 chipset, as it's promoted by various manufacturers as thé overclocking and hardware enthousiasts' chipset for 45nm. Different overclocking competitions are held all over the world to show off the power of the P45, many manufacturers try to launch boards with over-complete biosses which are filled with elaborate voltage and memory tweaking options.

We currently have an MSI and Asus motherboard on the tesbench, so we'll be looking into this new chipset pretty soon ... in other words: stay tuned!