Intel has officially launched their updated lineup of 4-series chipsets which now include the Intel G45, G43, P45 and P43. The new chipsets all support FSB speeds of up to 1.3GHz and DDR3 RAM speeds of up to 1.06GHz as well as a new low-power mode that significantly drops power use when paired with a newer, 45nm Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad processor.
The G45 and G43 chipsets focus mainly on HD video playback and are the first to include Intel's new Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD video platform, making them capable of full hardware acceleration of most HD video formats up to and including 1080p Blu-ray.
The P45 and P43 chipsets, on the other hand, are aimed at gamers and thus lack an integrated graphics chip to focus on dedicated video cards instead. P43 Express boards will likely be targeted at the budget market and will have trimmed down feature sets from the motherboard manufactures, whereas the P45 will be much more attractive to some higher-end gamers looking to run two PCI Express graphics cards in a CrossFire configuration. These chips will also come with Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (ETU), a software-level performance tweaking suite that the company said would bring "overclocking to the mainstream."
Motherboards using the P45 and P43 chipsets should be available almost immediately at a yet undisclosed price, while the G45 and G43-based will follow in the next month or so. In the meantime, you can check out further details and specifications on Intel's new chipsets at HotHardware.