The G45 Express and GMA X4500 HD

The G45 Express chipset is a step up from older Intel-based budget chipsets. It supports front-side bus speeds up to 1333 MHz, PCIe 2.0, DDR2 800 or DDR3 1066, and a whole mess of SATA ports through the ICH10 controller hub. The DG45ID in particular is a DDR2 motherboard, so that somewhat limits our memory bandwidth. It's pretty small as MicroATX boards go.

There are six SATA ports and no IDE ports at all, so you'll need to make sure you use a SATA optical drive. There is one PCIe x16 graphics slot, two x1 PCIe expansion slots, and a single PCI slot. Note that this motherboard does not support the really high-wattage Intel processors; the fastest supported chips are the quad-core Q9550 or the dual-core E8500.

Looking at the back plane, we see a whopping six USB ports, firewire, eSATA, five analog audio jacks, a TOSLINK optical audio output, and gigabit Ethernet. There are two digital video outputs—dual-link DVI and HDMI. 7.1 audio is supported through the IDT 92HD73E audio codec.

The GMA X4500 HD graphics in the G45 chipset is a relatively minor upgrade to the old GMA 3100/3500 in previous boards. It's a very similar part, only with 10 unified shader processors instead of 8, running at a higher clock speed. Intel says it's 2–3 times as fast as the GMA 3100 and as much as 70% faster than the GMA 3500 found on G35-based motherboards.

The X4500 HD is built on a 65nm manufacturing process, as opposed to the 90nm technology used to build the GMA 3xxx. The process shrink is what enabled the extra shader processors and higher clock speed.

Intel claims that the GMA X4500 HD supports DirectX 10, as the GMA 3500 did (with the right driver update). We tried it and it only "sort of" works. It's far too slow to be usable even in the most forgiving of DX10 titles, and even with all the details turned way down. It's also a little buggy—the Parallax Occlusion Map test in 3DMark Vantage crashes the system, and we saw little white dots all over the place when running Crysis in DX10 mode (at low settings).
So while DX10 may be a "bullet point" for Intel here, you might as well ignore the fact that it exists. No DX10 title runs well enough to even enable DX10 mode, even if they all ran perfectly (which they don't)