Jobastion wrote:I notice that in the Gigabyte table, there are absolutely no changes in processor frequency between the default settings (which I assume is with DES off), and with any of the levels enabled. (That is to say, it idles at 2Ghz and ramps up to 3Ghz under load with or without DES) That leads me to believe that all of the procesor throttling seen in the Gigabyte testing is the natural Intel SpeedStep.
Combined with that, and the screenshot of "Gigabyte Dynamic Energy saving on... " having the little dot besides CPU throttling colored red... which I believe = off, that makes me wonder, was the test run without that feature enabled, or does the feature just not work?
I have a wall socket energy monitoring device which my PC PSU is plugged into. My pc is a Q9450 CPU, GA-X48-DS5 Gigabyte motherboard, 2x2GB OCZ Reaper HPC 8500 DDR2, Gigabyte 512MB 3850 graphics card, 4 hard drives and 3 optical drives and 7 fans (CPU and six case fans).
I use the DES software and I am running it right now. The little red dot that you refer to beside the CPU throttling means that the feature was disabled and therefore the energy saving was not at it's maximum. But even though it refers to it as CPU throttling, it does not make any difference to the CPU speed. Disabling this does not turn off the Intel Speedstep or adjust the CPU frequency in any way. Intel Speedstep (EIST) and Enhanced Halt (C1E) have to be enabled in the Bios for DES to run or it pops up a window telling the user to enable these options in the Bios. So in a way it does not work, but enabling it does mean saving a very small amount of energy, 1 watt on my system. The Q9xxx series do not benefit so much from power saving such as DES like earlier CPU's did.
Another point to seriously consider is the fact that the review compared a DDR3 Asus motherboard with a DDR2 Gigabyte motherboard so the power usage would be expected to be higher with a motherboard using DDR2 due to the higher voltages used for the memory. So it was not really a fair playing field.
One more point to note about the review is the Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced that was shown earlier in the review does not work with the GA-X48-DS5 motherboard. I have tried it and it reports that the Bios does not support the software. The Dynamic Energy Saver Advanced is meant to be able to work with overclocking enabled so would be a much more desirable feature. As I understand it, this is only available on the newer P45 motherboards and only reduces the power phases and does not allow CPU throttling or undervolting when overclocked.
So in my opinion the review was very unfair and not a true comparison of Gigabyte and Asus motherboard energy saving.