Elite Bastards posted a preview on the ASUS P5Q Pro motherboard based on the Intel P45 chipset. Considering that this is probably the last Intel chipset launch we'll see before the company's Nehalem CPU architecture brings some big changes, what does it bring to the table, and can it prove a worthy successor to P35?

We mentioned towards the start of this review that Intel's P45 chipset is more about evolution than revolution, and that remains very much our impression at the end of our stint of testing this particular motherboard. As you'd expect from one of Intel's offerings, it's rock solid stable, with a good feature set than never threatens to be too jaw-dropping - In other words, exactly what you'd hope and expect from a mid-range chipset. The biggest plus point of P45 is for anyone looking to put together an ATI CrossFire setup on a budget, thanks to the combination of two electrical PCI Express 16x slots with enough bandwidth to feed two graphics boards without ever looking likely to run into any bottlenecks. Despite all the recent talk from Intel about CPU upgrades being more important than GPU upgrades, it seems that offering multi-GPU capability on a motherboard is here to stay, and is now an important part of even mainstream product offerings, with all but one of ASUS' P5Q range featuring two electrical PCI Express 16x slots.

This brings us neatly onto the P5Q Pro itself, a board with a tough act to follow considering the success of its direct predecessor, the P5K Pro. In essence, the P5Q Pro offers a very similar experience, with performance that is solid without ever blowing you away, and likewise features that are pretty well balanced for the level and likely price point of the board on offer. Yes, I'd like to see a better eSATA implementation and optical audio out, but that's exactly the kind of compromise that will likely make this board a tempting proposal towards the budget end of the P45 motherboard market.

In the end then, while both Intel's high-end X38 and X48 chipsets offer better performance, whether the P5Q Pro becomes a tempting purchase or not will likely come almost entirely down to price. We're still waiting on retail pricing for this board to be announced, but let's hope that it's significant enough to make this offering a worthy consideration. Until that point however, it should be noted that if you're desperate to upgrade now, then there's little need to wait for P45 motherboards to appear over simply picking up a P35 part, unless of course you plan on using, or moving to, an ATI CrossFire configuration any time soon.