Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers are making a big noise about P45 motherboards, but let me give you a few details about them. The boards will launch in May with the real availability in June and onward and the only big difference compared to P35 mainstream chipset will be a support for two PCIe 2.0 graphics cards slot.

Intel supports less a popular Crossfire dual-card solution that supports ATI’s graphic cards, while two Nvidia cards simply won’t work.

You can think of P45 as a cheaper version of X38 product hidden behind a new brand name. The “new” chipset will support ICH10R Southbridge but it won’t give anything spectacular to your boards. The board manufacturers are promising tunable performance solution with dual Gen 2 PCIe graphics, DDR3 up to 1333 official support and 2 DIMMs channel.

The manufacturers will have to choose between single PCIe 16X Gen 2 or two 8X Gen 2 graphics slots. The only new thing you can expect from ICH10 is Corwin Springs a wake on lan marchitecture that we mentioned here.