Motherboards with G45 Express chipsets have begun slowly trickling into the market, and some manufacturers are giving the new Intel integrated graphics chipset royal treatment. Case in point: Gigabyte's EG45M-DS2H, which pairs the G45 with some features you'd expect to see on much fancier boards.

The EG45M-DS2H channels the G45's built-in GMA X4500 HD graphics into VGA, DVI, and HDMI display outputs. You'll also find six 300MB/s Serial ATA ports (including one external port) with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 array configurations. Other features include Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver tech, Dolby Home Theater-certified audio, a built-in Trusted Platform Module chip, S/PDIF, FireWire, and Gigabit Ethernet.The G45 chipset gives the board support for 1333MHz front-side bus speeds and 800MHz DDR2 memory, but Gigabyte claims the board can hit 1600MHz on the FSB and 1066MHz for the memory when overclocking. Speaking of overclocks, the EG45M-DS2H features enthusiast-class goodies like dual BIOSes, solid-state capacitors, ferrite core chokes, and low-resistance MOSFETs. That said, enthusiasts may feel limited by the mobo's lone PCI Express x16 slot, which only features four lanes of PCIe connectivity.