Not sure most readers here care about power consumption, although we all will need to start soon. Pretty sure the P5Q-E supports BOTH PCI-E 16x1 OR 8x2.

I'm not sure the power consumption comparison is completely fair towards the P45 cipset. The used P35 motherboard has 6 phases, if I'm not mistaken, while the P5Q-E and EP45-DQ6 have 8 and 12 phases respectively. I would have loved to see a power consumption survey that took this into account.
However, you definitely proved a point. One would expect that the power consumption went down with the die-shrink. Not up or stay at the same level.

Considering what the video, cpu use, I could care less about mb wattage. When the other stuff gets a lot lower I'll care, till then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So PCI-E 2.0 is not worth having right now, is it? I mean if i had a HD4850 card would it make a difference with PCI-E 2.0 and PIC-E 1? Now P45 boards cost much more than P35 and seeing as it delivers no performance gain, i think P35 is the way to go.
And yes, 10watt difference is a lot, really.

I have the P5Q-E and it DOSE support 8x 8x PCIe 2.0 CrossFire. I know this for a fact as I am running it right now. Hell, you could even add in another 4850 in the lower slot at 4x PCIe 1. Come on Toms team. Also, what about relitave CrossFire performance compared to the X38/48? I have been dying for this article from you guys just for that comparison.

The power consumption is important but you can't make a definite conclusion about P35 vs P45 from just two motherboards. Power consumption even on the same chipset varies a lot between motherboards. Maybe try the Gigabyte P5Q-E (just guessing from the reasonably sized heatsinks)?

There's no point in buying a p45 or an x48 if you already have the p35/x38. Wait for Nehalem!

What I really would like to see is a P35/P45 vs X38/X48 mashup!

^Agreed! In some cases the P45 beats the X38 when it comes to OCing (ie high stable FSBs on P45)

I think there's a typo descriping the type of memory supported by the MSI P45 Diamond motherboard. It states "The Diamond version supports DDR2 instead of DDR3, which makes sense at this time. ". The Diamond only supports DDR3.

I see nothing wrong with the "small" improvements added to the P45 series. The P45 boards are the same price as the P35 with the small improvements. They won't awe the hardcore gamer, but improvements to power management is cool for everyone.

What we really need now is for the price of DDR3 (which will save around 4 watts) to drop from the sky.

I look forward to seeing how the new integrated graphics of the G45 perform.

This review has very different results for power consumption.
It shows the P45 using quite a bit less than the P35.

When combined with the opposite results you are seeing, It appears the issue may be in the boards you tested and not the P45 chipset itself.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1 [...] index.html

Hey AUTHOR:
Can you post/send your overclocking setting or asus o.c. profile so I can see your setup. I just got the board and wanna see how I can do on the newest BIOS. Thanks!

I plan to order a new build based on Q9450 and 4850 GPU. I was going to choose P45 (P5Q) since I do not plan to overclock nor do I plan to crossfire. I get PCIE 2.0 and the most stable chipset possible for this build. The X48 would be wasted $$$ and overkill. Not sure why this conclusion was missing from the article.

i would have rather liked to know more about amd's new 7 series chipsets. there is VERY little documentation/benchmarks on them. It would be awesome to see a "performance/price" review on very comparable motherboards changing pretty much ONLY the chipset. I would like a 790fx, but thus far i havn't been able to find a whole lot of comparison data telling me that the difference (other than more video card support) between "x" and "fx" or even the 770 for that matter (770=no crossfirex/sli)
ANYWHO chipsets seem to be pretty under the radar, and kudo's for actually paying attention to them. Now for those new fangled amd ones? :-p

Biostar Tpower I45? .. how did you manage to leave that board out, cheap and proberly the best board around?

Agreed they really should have tested the Biostar Tpower I45 and/or TForce TP43D2A7 since they both claim record breaking OC performance and aren't really any more expensive than other P43/P45 boards to buy. I personally have the TForce TP43D2A7 and while I've only run it up to 400bus speed 1600fsb it's very stable and a great deal for the price point plus supports the newer Intel processors which in and of itself is nice compared to some of the P35 motherboards which require a bios update first. PCI 2.0 will only become more important in the future as well, but that was basically mentioned anyway.