Consistency is a hard thing to come by in this industry, but year after year, Intel has managed to deliver excellent mid-range core logic chipsets. Since its launch last spring, the P35 Express has been the best bang-for-your-buck Core 2 chipset on the market—a position inherited from its P965 predecessor, which was the LGA775 platform of choice in its day. The P965's crown, of course, was a hand-me-down from the Intel 915P chipset that came before it, which in turn, well, you get the picture.

Intel's mid-range chipsets are perhaps the very definition of the sweet spot; they offer nearly all the performance of the company's high-end chipsets and comparable features at a fraction of the cost. Trickle-down is a wonderful thing indeed, and its value hasn't been lost on motherboard makers, which tend to eagerly snap up Intel's latest mid-range chipsets and deploy them across a wide range of different products. We've seen the latest P35 Express featured in stripped-down budget boards selling for less than $100, enthusiast-oriented offerings draped in indulgent excess that cost $200 and up, and all points in between.Given the impressive flexibility and consistent quality of Intel's mid-range chipsets, we've naturally been looking forward to the new P45 Express with bated breath. This successor to the P35 hasn't yet been formally announced, but we managed to get our hands on P45-based P5Q and P5Q3 Deluxe motherboards from Asus to run through the wringer. Read on to see if Intel's latest mid-range chipset lives up to its lineage.While some motherboard makers garishly adorn their enthusiast boards with neon, glow-in-the-dark, or otherwise look-at-me trim, Asus manages to keep the P5Q and P5Q3 Deluxe looking classy. The boards still have a little flash thanks to polished copper heatsinks and blue accents, but it's the kind of restrained bling that shouldn't offend anyone. Looks don't matter, of course, unless you're going to be admiring your system through a case window—something that a PC enthusiast particularly proud of their rig might be inclined to do from time to time. Not that I'd ever admit to such a thing.The star of the P5Q line is Intel's new P45 Express chipset, which in a bit of a surprise, only offers official support for front-side bus speeds up to 1333MHz. We'd expected the P45 to natively support 1600MHz front-side bus speeds like Intel's high-end X48 chipset, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Official limitations haven't stopped Asus from making faster front-side bus speeds available in the BIOS, though. More on those in a moment.

Like the P35 Express that preceded it, the P45's memory controller supports either DDR2 or DDR3 memory. Asus' P5Q Deluxe is built for the former with the P5Q3 Deluxe equipped for the latter. Apart from their memory slots, the boards are identical. We don't expect there to be much interest in the P5Q3 given current memory prices, though; DDR3 is still far too expensive in relation to DDR2 to justify its marginal performance and power consumption advantages.

At least both boards share the same layout, which is generally excellent. Primary and auxiliary power plugs are located right along the edges of the board where we like to see them, reducing airflow-constricting cable clutter around the CPU socket. This power plug placement can be problematic for upside-down cases or extremely small mid-towers that have little clearance between the motherboard and PSU, but it's the best compromise for the majority of systems. An auxiliary 12V power plug extender can easily remedy compatibility issues with upside-down cases, anyway.