These P45 boards look excellent for those wishing to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of Penryn CPUs, without breaking the bank in buying a $300+ motherboard and super-expensive memory. Early reports suggest excellent FSB overclocking potential.

The P45 looks to be great for benchmarkers who want to see that extra few percent or for Crossfire users. Being a single-card real-world type of guy it looks like there's no reason to change from a P35 board unless these are somehow going to clock quads a lot higher. The lower power draw is nice of course but for anyone who is going to use a single card the blowout prices on P35 will be hard not to recommend.

Intel DP45SG board supports up to 16 GB memory.

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/DP45SG/index.htm

But sadly for now, it's DDR3.

It's kind of disappointing that this chipset doesn't bring more in the way of new features to the table. On the other hand, as a shrink of a mature design we can at least hope that it will be rock stable and run cooler. While for some people that spells overclocking potential, for me this chipset plus the Penryn CPUs hopefully will offer the coolest, quietest, most power-efficient setup for the next few years (particularly if the first iteration of Nehalem runs as hot and power-hungry as it is looking right now).

I look forward to a TR round-up of P45-based boards, especially those that support DDR2.

Well, that definitively answers the question I had regarding the ICH10's rumoured built-in wifi-n capability.

Anyways, glad to see an official announcement. Time for me to start watching the stores for the P5Q boards. Thanks for the writeup, Geoff. :)