ICH10 supports up to 6 x Serial ATA-II/300 storage ports, along with support for RAID 0/1/5/10 on the –R versions of the chipsets. The P45 Express supports Intel’s ICH10 or ICH10R (w/ RAID) Southbridge controllers, which is largely feature identical to ICH9/ICH9R. Even on ATI’s fastest Radeons, we doubt this will be a performance degrading feature, although it’s somewhat disappointing that Intel still doesn’t have dedicated PCI Express x16 lanes across the board, as rival Nvidia chipsets have had this for several generations. However, these are not true x16 slots, as when in multi-GPU mode, these slots will automatically drop down to PCI Express 2.0 x8 speeds. The P45 supports two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots and can support AMD/ATI Radeon cards in a CrossFire configuration. New with the P45 is support for PCI Express 2.0, a feature which was only available on the X38/X48 chipsets on the Intel side until now.

We’re expecting most major motherboard companies to release multiple products on the P45 to support both standards, as DDR2 still commands significant demand due to its excellent price/performance ratio. The P45 supports both dual-channel DDR2 (800 MHz - up to 16 GB capacity) and dual-channel DDR3 (1066 MHz - up to 8 GB capacity), and it will be up to motherboard manufacturers to decide which standard to support. However, considering even older generation P35 boards could easily hit 1800 MHz FSB speeds with little work, there is no doubt in our mind that P45 Express boards will easily hit 1900-2000 MHz+ FSB speeds given the proper BIOS controls.

Currently, Intel only recommends the X48 chipset for front side bus speeds over 1333 MHz.

The P45 Express supports Socket-775 Core 2 Duo/Quad processors at up to 1333 MHz, which means “official” 1600 MHz FSB support is still out of the mix.

What is intel g45 g43 express chipset