While Intel's integrated chipset may not be able to compete with AMD they still make a very good mid-range chipset. Recently they launched the P45 Express chipset and motherboard manufacturers worked on all their motherboards to get the best out of solution. Today we have one of these to look at from Asus, the P5Q Deluxe with a number of strong unique features.

Let's start off with the new P45 Express chipset. One of the major new features over the P35 is the upgrade tp PCI-Express 2.0 slot from 1.0 increasing bandwidth. DDR2 or DDR3 is supported though the board we're testing uses DDR2. The chipset is one of the first from Intel to use a 65nm manufacturing process which cuts down heat and power consumption dramatically. Our Asus P5Q Deluxe and other newer Asus boards try to cut this down even more so with their proprietary technology, EPU or Energy Processing Unit which tweaks the computer to use less power. The new Southbridge also features a die shrink and otherwise no major changes.

The P45 isn't the most exciting chipset if solid but luckily our Asus P5Q Deluxe is. The board features the large copper heatsinks and heatpipes that Asus have used for sometime to allow for passive cooling of which they do an excellent job even when overclocked. A total of 3 PCI-Express 16x slots are featured supporting AMD/ATI's Crossfire with two additional 1X PCI-Express slots and two more PCI slots. If you do go three way though you'll be limited to single slot cards for the other two slots as they sit next to each other on the board but honestly if you're going that far you're better off with that anyway. There's plenty of room for a larger heatsink around the LGA 775 socket as well for overclockers.

The board features a whopping eight SATA connectors onboard which amazingly also stay out of the way of expansion slots with ports both on the edge of the board and mounted on top. The main PCI-Express 16x slot has been moved down a few places to accomodate both a PCI-Express 1x slot and a PCI slot which allows for plenty of room to add and remove memory without a long graphics card getting in the way. Have a few PATA drives laying around? Don't worry as Intel might have forgotten them but Asus hasn't with one on the edge on the board and another mounted on top near the power connector. In addition to this power and reset switches are included on the board as with other Asus high-end products although nothing to clear the CMOS, though we had no problems coming back from a bad overclock attempt.

For ports the Asus P5Q features 6 USB 2.0 ports, one E-SATA, one Firewire, two Gigabit NICs, unusually one PS2 port for either mouse or keyboard though you're out of luck if you want two use two PS2 ports, ADI AD2000B 8 channel HD audio with coax and optical outputs. On the inside four more USB ports are available via expansion, an extra Firewire port, and more.

For the chipset Asus officially supports 1.66GHz front side bus up from 1.33Ghz of Intel's spec and all the way up to DDR2 1200MHz RAM. The P5Q Deluxe supports true 16 phase power, as mentioned their EPU power saving support, Asus Q-Shield, Q-Connector, Drive Xpert, Die Hard BIOS, O.C. Profiles, Fan Xpert and more. Read more about these features over at Asus' website. Suffice to say the Asus P5Q Deluxe is overloaded with unique features from Asus but the largest and newest by far is Express Gate SSD. This is a proprietary pre-boot environment with the OS loaded from the BIOS ROM and a Linux stack on a flash drive onboard the motherboard. We'll go into detail soon with a review of the software but suffice to say it is a very interesting and cool feature from Asus.

Accessories include 8 SATA cables, Asus Q-Shield I/O cover, Q-Connector, manual, case badge, optional cooling fan, and a USB and Firewire Bracket.

Let's move onto the BIOS.

The BIOS is a more cleaner, standard issue higher-end Asus BIOS with a numerous options for voltage, front-side bus, and multiplier adjustments depending your need for performance gains, power savings, and overclocking. There is a bit of a change as most options now must be keyed in and there is no drop down except for memory speeds which might not be the best if you don't know your limits but the BIOS also provides information for the default and normal voltage ranges and let's you know when it is working outside of those ranges.

Overclocking was a success as increasing the voltages on our E6420 allowed us to obtain a 3.56GHz overclock or more than 1.5Ghz over the standard E6420. This however was still 100MHz short of what our Asus Striker II 780i which might be blamed on Intel's chipset inability to unlock memory speeds from the front-side bus

Dropping down the CPU multiplier and pushing only the front-side bus resulted in a 1.88GHz fsb overclock.

Here's our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 x86 with the latest Intel chipset drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.6 drivers.

Let's start off with some game benchmarks.

The Intel chipset has a slight lead with Futuremark's 3DMark 06 for gaming and PC Mark for general performance.

Southbridge performance is fairly even although the access time is a little better on the P5Q Deluxe.

USB performance is very similar between the two boards.

Gigabit also shows no major differences.

Now we'll take a look at power consumption in watts.