If you don’t just like Gigabit ports—you love them— Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-DQ6 is the motherboard for you. This mobo has four Gigabit ports that can be teamed together for one seriously fat-ass network connection.

Elsewhere, the board is typical Gigabyte; it includes surface-mounted buttons and the most clearly marked USB and FireWire ports we’ve ever seen. So if you nuke your USB drive because you plugged the USB connector into a FireWire header, it’s your own fault, brother.The board, of course, is based on Intel’s new P45 chipset and sports two physical x16 PCI-E 2.0 slots. One runs at x16, the other at x8. Intel’s P45 doesn’t officially support 1,600MHz front-side bus speeds, but Gigabyte says the board will hit 1,600 without any issues. Since the GA-EP45-DQ6 is more of a midrange board, Gigabyte went with DDR2 instead of DDR3, which is understandable. Although it’s getting more affordable, DDR3 is still expensive if you want modules that will hit overclocked speeds of 1,600MHz or 1,800MHz.

We found no major layout gaffes with the board, and, in fact, favor the GA-EP45-DQ6’s design over that of the MSI P45 Platinum we reviewed in September. While the P45 Platinum gives you just two x1 slots, Gigabyte hands you two x4 slots and an x1 PCI-E, as well as the standard dual x16 slots.

The GA-EP45-DQ6 did lag behind the MSI P45 Platinum in several benchmarks. Some consumers will be troubled by this, but these performance hiccups are to be expected early in a motherboard’s release, and BIOS updates usually solve them.
So what’s not to like? The GA-EP45-DQ6 is a bit pricey for a P45 board—about $70 more than the faster, but not as well spec’d, P45 Platinum. And its price is within striking distance of X48-based boards, which are superior for CrossFire applications.

Still, if Gigabyte can correct the performance kinks, this is a pretty nice board for someone who isn’t running multi-GPU applications and, of course, just loves Gigabit ports.

At first glance, Intel's technical documentation for the new P45 / G45 Express series chipsets, you'll note looks are alarmingly similar to the previous generation P35 / G35 Express series that this new lineup of chipsets is meant to replace. As the P35 series was a rather successful architecture, this immediately struck us on a positive first note about the P45. The more we read on, the more we realized that the Intel P45 chipset shares many of the same features and attributes as Intel’s high-end X38 / X48 chipsets, just at a much lower price point.

Initial reports about the Intel P45 have shown the chipset to be strong, as early end-user reports have shown that first generation motherboards are already hitting front side bus speeds well over 500 MHz (2,000 MHz FSB) with preliminary BIOS releases. As the P45 chipset uses a more modern 65nm manufacturing technology (compared to 90nm of previous generations), the strong overclockability of the chipset wasn’t too unexpected. Die shrinks typically do help overclockability, along with lowered power consumption and heat production levels.As the Intel P35 and P45 are so similar, motherboard manufacturers have been quick to adopt this new product and integrate it into their existing board designs. However, there are some companies, like Asus, who take the P45 to another level that we weren’t expecting this early on in the chipset's lifecycle.

Of course, this all leads up to what we’re interested in here today, Asus’s new high-end motherboard based on the P45 chipset. Typically, motherboards in the Asus "Republic of Gamers" (RoG) family come out a few months after initial products, as it gives them a chance to get a feel for the chipset and really refine the motherboard's design. Apparently that wasn’t needed for the P45 though. Dubbed the Maximus II Formula, this new P45 motherboard takes off where Asus’s P35 gaming platforms, the Blitz-series, left off. So Join us, will you, on a look at the Asus Maximus II Formula Intel P45 motherboard.
The P45 Express (commonly shortened in name to "P45") will be Intel’s recommended chipset for most high-end PC’s throughout 2008 and likely throughout a good chunk of 2009. Intel still claims that the newly released X48 chipset is the best option for gamers and performance users, but a close look through the spec sheet reveals almost no difference between these two products. While the X48 certainly has the allure of a top of the line product (along with “official” support for 1600 MHz front side bus speeds), the P45 delivers the same feature set in 95% of the core areas which gamers, enthusiasts, overclockers, whomever, actually use.