Conclusion 

The move to go green is certainly a refreshing change from the usual performance/ overclocking rat race. With the Dynamic Energy Saver function, I found that the most power savings to be had was from shutting down the excessive power phases rather than just throttling the CPU voltage or operating frequency alone. With the larger motherboard makers pushing for ever more power phases on their motherboards, it's good to see that GIGABYTE/ Intersil have recognized that shutting down power phases that are not required would actually reduce power consumption significantly. This, even as many enthusiasts amongst us look to reduce the power consumption of auxiliary systems that are on 24/7 by using the typical methods: reducing frequency and voltage.

Unfortunately, not all is as rosy as it looks. The CPU throttling feature in  DES has a significant impact on performance as the software seems to have issues detecting CPU load with multi-core processors. That is just about every processor on the market these days. When running 2 instances of Orthos to load the all the cores of the Kentsfield, the throttling was disabled almost instantaneously - an indication that the software only sees basic performance counters from the operating system rather than the load on each core. Hence, if you're running a single threaded application that fully utilizes one core out of a quad-core CPU, DES would not disable the throttling.

If you are looking at the bottom line and want to know whether DES is a failed attempt, I can safely say: No. As can be seen from the power consumption tests, CPU frequency throttling makes for insignificant power savings but it has a major impact on performance. However, the shutting down of phases does have a significant impact on the power draw and it does not compromise on performance. Hence, my advice for would-be users is to enable DES and voltage throttling but not to enable CPU frequency throttling. Also, it will be nice to see DES implemented on GIGABYTE boards since they are fairly feature rich these days and are potential home server candidates that will be left on 24/7 with lots of idling time.

Although the technology is still new and not mature at the moment, there are already promising results from the implementation of dynamic power phases. It's something new and unheard of prior to this and I hope that more can be done to polish up the software (CPU frequency throttling) in the near future. DES is certainly something interesting coming from GIGABYTE and should prove to be a yardstick for other manufacturers who are in the Green race.

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