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Gigabyte's EP45-DS3P gets pictured up close

by on14 April 2008

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Impressive mid-range motherboard

Gigabyte seems to be taking the competition seriously, as it has added a range of new features to its P45 board which Expreview scored some very up close and personal pictures of. These are the first detailed pictures of a P45 board that we've seen, although we'd expect a lot more like this to appear over the next couple of months.

The board has three x16 slots for starters, although you have the option of running a single by x16 or dual x8, with the fourth slot having x4 bandwidth as per the P35 chipset. However, in this case, we'd expect the x1 slots to become unavailable, as we doubt the ICH10 has any more PCIe lanes than the ICH9, which is limited to six.

With three x1 slots, dual Gigabit Ethernet and an IDE controller hanging off the PCIe bus, that's already six lanes taken up. At least it gives you the option to have a play with three-way CrossFire, although the third card can only be single slot. There's also a single PCI slot.

Gigabyte has also added power, reset and CMOS reset buttons to this board, although they're located below the bottom PCIe slot, making them awkward to get to once the board is inside a case, especially if you'd populate this PCIe slot.

Other features include eight rear USB 2.0 ports with headers for four more, a pair of FireWire ports with a header for an additional port, 7.1-channel sound with optical and coaxial S/PDIF, two PS/2 ports, six SATA connectors, one IDE connector, a serial port header, Dual BIOS and DES. This board supports 1,600MHz FSB, DDR2 memory and the latest VRM spec from Intel.

You can check out the pictures here

Last modified on 14 April 2008
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