Gigabyte EP35-DS4: DES in Action

INTRODUCTION

Green is all the rage these days.  Green is healthy, green is great for the environment, green is more of the crinkly stuff found in your purse or pocket.  Green is also the color of the dollar signs seen by companies that recognize the potential of this new environmentally conscious market.

Already most electronics are now RoHS compliant.  From graphics cards to motherboards, iPods to some RAZR phones, they are rated to be lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, PBB, even PBDE free.  Before that there was EnergyStar, most people remember the now familiar yellow and green logo seen in the top left corner of their computer’s start up screen that indicated the product or appliance it was featured on was not unnecessarily wasteful with power.

Now the current trend is focusing on energy more than ever, regardless whether to cut costs at the end of the month or the simple knowledge that over half of the United State’s energy is produced from coal, therefore lower energy consumption translates into less coal pollution.  When many consumers are penny pinching wherever they can, companies like Gigabyte and ASUS have decided to begin marketing energy saving motherboards not to a niche market, but to the masses.

For this article we will put one of these new Gigabyte Dynamic Energy Saver (DES) motherboards to the test with a power hungry Q6600 QuadCore processor.  We will see if you can really save power without compromising your computers performance or more importantly its stability.  By the end of this review we will find out if DES shows any appreciable value or is just more marketing hype to take advantage of the greener marketplace.
 

ABOUT GIGABYTE

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.