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The I/O panel brings a new dimension to the word minimal. Naturally there is no sign of old school Serial and Parallel ports but Intel has gone further and has also ditched the PS/2 ports. Unfortunately Intel has decided that six USB 2.0 ports are sufficient which seems like poor judgement as you'll need two of the ports just for your mouse and keyboard. There are headers for six more USB ports but no brackets are included in the package.

The Gigabit Ethernet is powered by Intel silicon and the Dolby HD audio chip comes from IDT (Integrated Device Technology). Intel has added to the features provided by the P45 chipset by adding an LSI Firewire controller with one port on the I/O panel and a header for a second port on the board.

Our initial attempts to benchmark the DP45DG caused a certain amount of frustration as we were expecting the board to behave like the DX38BT, DX48BT2, DX58SO and D975XBX2. This was optimistic and we should have spotted the signs; the DP45SG doesn't have a micro button for Power but it does have an on board speaker that beeps during POST and again as the Operating System loads in a manner somewhat reminiscent of R2D2 [well at least it's not C3PO - ed.]. These signs proved to be indications that the DP45SG is not quite as serious as it first appears.

We started by running the DP45SG at default speeds using version 0112 of the BIOS. Although the BIOS correctly reported the speed of our Core 2 Duo E8500 as 9.5 x 333MHz = 3.16GHz we found that performance was rather low. A quick investigation revealed that the front side bus was set at 266MHz, despite the BIOS saying otherwise, with the result that the CPU was running at 2.5GHz. We were able to set the front side bus speed manually but that meant that we had to contend with the warning message in the Performance section of the BIOS

We updated to BIOS 0116 and found that the CPU speed recovered to the correct level but that wasn't the end of our troubles.

You only get three settings for memory speed (800MHz, 1066MHz and 1333MHz) however those speeds only apply with the front side bus set at 333MHz (at least in the case of the Core 2 Duo E8500). When you raise the FSB the memory speed options in the BIOS remain the same although the speeds do actually change in step with the front side bus so it is clear that the three speeds actually relate to a memory multiplier. Once you figure that out you might feel brave enough to select one of the settings but we found that any change in this department resulted in a system that is horribly unstable and prone to locking up. The only safe approach we could find was to leave the memory speed on Auto and to ramp up the front side bus. The upshot was that the Extreme DP45SG ran slightly faster than the MSI P45C Neo-FIR although performance was a tad lower which doesn't sound particularly Extreme to our way of thinking.

Verdict

Although the DP45SG sports the Extreme logo it is actually just a dual graphics slot toting, Crossfire supporting, budget P45 motherboard. We suppose the Mundane! range wouldn't quite have had the same effect.

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