Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4

INTRODUCTION

If we look back in twenty years, this decade maybe best described as the “Green Decade”.  With the global warming becomes more of an increasing concern, we see the tech industry is also doing their parts producing greener products.  Today, we can see that the next generation of processors and graphic cards are not only able to outperform the previous generation products, they also reduce the power consumption.  Almost all processors and graphic cards on the market today have the ability to reduce their clockspeed when the demand is low in order to reduce power consumption. 

One of the hardest components to reduce power consumption inside a PC would be the motherboard.  The motherboard is not as simple as graphic cards and processors in terms of power reduction as it is composed of various parts and components.  These components cannot be turned on and off on demand or throttle like the GPUs and CPUs.  Of course, you can turn off certain ports on the motherboard but that only helps to reduce a tiny bit of power consumption.  This is an area where the motherboard manufactures are starting to work on.

Currently, the high-end motherboards are fairly similar her in terms of performance and features.  Unlike old motherboards where they differ from each other in terms of overclockability, amount of ports, bundles, and features.  Current motherboards seem to be performing so close to each other that often motherboards with same chipsets will have performance less than 5% from each other.  In order to differentiate themselves among other boards, motherboard manufactures are starting implement different approaches.  Asus is probably the most ambitious with their motherboard bundle and avant-garde chipset cooling and designs.  MSI, on the other hand, tries to stands out by incorporate Audigy onboard audio.  Gigabyte is doing something slightly different than either Asus or MSI.   They have decided to produce greener motherboard with their latest DES motherboard family.  In fact, Gigabyte is commented to the “greener” products as many of their current line-up of products (graphic cards and motherboards) are designed to reduce power consumption.

A quick look at Gigabyte’s site and you can see that they have implemented DES into almost all of their current line ups.  Today, we will take a closer look into Gigabyte’s DES with their GA-EX38-DS4 and see if their DES motherboards can save you a few bucks in the electric bills.  Also, we are hoping to answer the question that whether or not this new approach has any ill effect to your overall system performance.  We will put the GA-EX38-DS4 (with DES supports) against the GA-X38-DS4 (without DES support) to have a direct comparison of the performance and power consumption.
 

GIGABYTE: The company

GIGABYTE is known throughout the industry as a leader in mainboard and VGA technology. Pioneering such technologies as the i-Ram and all solid capacitor design of their motherboards, it easy to see why they have grown to be a world class provider of technology to the home user. Here is an excerpt taken from their web site:

GIGABYTE, one of the most well-known IT brands in the industry, started as a motherboard technology research laboratory with the passion of a few young engineers two decades ago. With the vision and insights to the market, GIGABYTE has become one of the world's largest manufacturers. On top of motherboards and graphics accelerators, GIGABYTE has further expanded its product portfolio to include notebook and desktop PC's, digital home entertainment appliances, networking servers, communications, mobile and handheld devices. GIGABYTE has risen from an eight-man office to a world class enterprise in the IT industry.