bit-tech News: Early Look: Gigabyte P45-DS5 motherboard

[news 28]

Hi all,

 

We have just published an early look at *Gigabyte's P45-DS5 motherboard*

- if you could post a link on your site that would be very much appreciated.

 

*Link:*

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/14/early_look_gigabyte_ga-p45-ds5/1

 

 

*Picture:*

http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2008/04/early_look_gigabyte_ga-p45-ds5/fp_img.jpg

 

 

*Quote:

*/"Gigabyte has done *a lot* to improve the P45's layout over its

previous P35 board -- while we loved the DS3R, other products like the

EP35-DS4 (pictured right, on the left of the two) had compatibility

problems with the SATA ports.

 

The P45-DS5 fixes this by making all the SATA ports at 90 degree angles

to the edge of the board so they don't conflict with longer graphics

cards. In addition to this there are now *ten* SATA ports -- four of

which are from a Silicon Image chipset. While the RAID can't be combined

with the new ICH10R southbridge, they all offer NCQ, ACHI and eSATA support.

 

The Gigabyte branded JMicron chipset provides the IDE port which is

still missing from ICH10, like it was from ICH9, and even though the IDE

port is awkwardly placed right down the bottom of the board it shouldn't

matter too much since there's oodles of SATA for optical drives.

 

The DS5 shown here is DDR2 only and supports "up to 1,200MHz" according

to Gigabyte. If the current P35 range is anything to go by, expect DDR3

and mixed DDR2/DDR3 boards to pop up as well.

 

Even though Gigabyte says the overclocking of the P45 and P35 should be

similar, clearly Gigabyte are tailored its P45-DS5 for some serious

overclocking: it features six phases of CPU power regulation, two phases

on the northbridge and two phases on the DDR2 memory slots. We also love

the new on-board power, reset and clear CMOS buttons that are almost

identical those used on the Asus Republic of Gamer series motherboards."/

*

 

*Cheers guys!

 

Tim Smalley

www.bit-tech.net