Asus is readying its G45 and G43 products and the first models in the new line-up should be the P5Q-EM (G45) and P5QL-EM (G43), which both are mATX motherboards which appear to have pretty solid feature sets.

Both boards feature HDMI, DVI and D-sub display connectivity, and on top of this they have a PS/2 port for the keyboard, six USB 2.0 ports, eSATA, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel analog sound. The P5Q-EM also features optical S/PDIF out, something the cheaper version has to go without.

Furthermore, these boards have a single x16 PCIe slot, two x1 PCIe slots and one PCI slot. There are also six SATA ports, one IDE connector, headers for a further six USB ports and one FireWire port, and oddly enough, a header for a serial port, as well.

Both boards have four memory slots and passive chipset cooling. We'd be somewhat concerned about the 4-phase power regulation, as this doesn't seem to be enough for some processors, although if you're sticking to dual-core models, it shouldn't be a problem.

We don't have a specific retail date for either board, but we'd expect both to launch shortly. Below is a picture of the P5Q-EM.