BOARD LAYOUT

There's very little with the DG45ID that we haven't already seen when it comes to board layout. In fact, its layout is almost identical to the aforementioned DG33TL G33-based motherboard, with the only differences being in the onboard components used. Here's another look at the board from the top:

The layout of the Intel DG45ID reflects the company's years of experience designing motherboards in the cleanliness of its organization. While the level of attention to detail isn't quite as fanatical as we've seen lately from companies like ASUS, and there's virtually no enthusiast-oriented glitz to speak of, the overall design of the board is very straightforward and practical, with some nice surprises.

At a glance, there don't appear to be any potential clearance train wrecks for extremely long video cards, and the overall use of space within the Micro ATX form factor's truncated dimensions is surprisingly effective. From this overhead view of the motherboard, you'll also notice that there's plenty of room to reach the retention tabs for all of the memory slots, even with a video card installed - this has been a common complaint with other boards we've seen, but the DG45ID offers room to spare.

The DG45ID features four memory slots, arranged in pairs for each individual memory channel. This arrangement is great for installing memory with bulky heatspreaders, since the four sticks aren't simply packed in together like sardines. It's also great for airflow if you have only two memory modules installed, since the channels are interleaved - you'll populate the blue slots first, then the black ones, leaving plenty of room for the modules to breathe.

The LGA 775 CPU socket on the DG45ID leaves plenty of room on all sides for a bulky 'tower'-style CPU cooler, with the chipset and its bulky heatsink being placed far enough away to still allow space to work with your fingers, even with the board installed in a case. The capacitors near the CPU socket are low-profile, conductive-polymer parts, so they won't interfere with the mounting systems of most tower-style CPU coolers. Though as always, it's helpful to double-check your heatsink manufacturer's motherboard compatibility list before making a heatsink buying decision.

The DG45ID uses a combination of conductive polymer and electrolytic capacitors. The conductive polymer capacitors are used in the output stages of the motherboard's power supply circuitry, which means that any drift in the effective capacitance values of the electrolytic capacitors on the board won't affect the quality of the power reaching the CPU.

At the bottom front corner of the DG45ID motherboard, you'll find five SATA ports. The DG45ID features a total of six SATA2 3.0 Gb/s connectors - the sixth is an eSATA port on the rear panel of the motherboard. There are also three headers for external USB ports, as well as an IEEE-1394a header and an Intel HD Audio header for front-panel audio I/O. The G45 chipset's southbridge is an ICH10R, which supports RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations. It's covered by a low-profile aluminum heatsink that won't interfere with a multi-slot video card cooler.

One thing you'll notice about the Intel DG45ID's array of rear-panel ports is that it's completely free of any 'legacy' connections. PS/2, RS-232 (serial), and parallel ports have all been kicked to the curb, though you can still connect an RS-232 port via a header. We're glad to finally see the move away from outdated interfaces - thus freeing up additional rear-panel space for even more device connectivity.

The DG45ID places its expansion slots a bit differently than we've seen in the past. The PCI Express x16 slot is sandwiched in between two PCI Express 1x slots, which means that there's still room to install a PCI Express 1x card if you've got a video card installed that has a double-height cooler. The DG45ID sports a total of four expansion slots, and they're placed such that you can make use of all four at once, if you use a GPU card with a single-slot cooler.

Now that we've taken a closer look at the Intel DG45ID's layout, let's delve into its BIOS.