Tom's Hardware Taiwan has paid a visit to Gigabyte for some pre-CeBIT action and has been given a sneak preview of its first Intel P45-based motherboard, the P45-DS3R. The model name gives away two things, the board uses all solid capacitors and it has onboard RAID. The chipset is passively cooled by a slightly enlarged aluminium heatsink, which suggests that it does not run very hot.

Although they did not get any really clear pictures of the motherboard itself, they have a test rig set up that was fully operational and they even got the chance to run a basic run of 3DMark 06 on the board using a Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU and a GeForce 9600 GT graphcis card.

The board features a pair of x16 slots, although the P45 chipset is limited to x8 bandwidth when both slots are used. It also has three x1 slots and two PCI slots and six SATA connectors with support for a wide range of RAID configurations. It also has onboard 7.1-channel sound, FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet and supports DDR2 memory.

It also features Gigabyte's power saving feature, DES and you can clearly see the LEDs at the top right-hand corner of the board. This board should be on display at CeBIT, and hopefully we will be able to snap a better picture of it then.

You can find a few pictures as well as the benchmark results here in Mandarin.