Introduction

P45 chipset boards are now coming in thick and fast. Intel really has a cash cow when it comes to the 4 series chipsets, especially P45. While P35 managed to give Intel the winning hand over AMD, P45s upgraded features such as true Crossfire support, PCIe 2.0 specs as well as upgraded DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers has us looking at what could now be the next '440BX' chipset.

GIGABYTE has been on the forefront of motherboard technology for some time; not only were they the first to introduce dual phase voltage systems on their boards to allow voltage phases above 8, but they were the first company to introduce the RoHS motherboards as well as being able to implement any sort of power saving technology on their boards. While others claim to save more power, GIGABYTE can't be knocked for starting this power saving revolution and it continues today.

Just recently GIGABYTE added a new chapter to its motherboard line, namely the Ultra Durable 3 design. UD3 is the final replacement for the UD2 line that GIGABYTE has used for the last three years and hopefully we will see a lot more UD3 based boards in the near future. Today we have the first UD3 board to roll out from GIGABYTEs Taiwan factory; we graciously test out the EP45-UD3P.