Gigabyte DES - motherboard power supply management

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wim
Posts: 777
Joined: Wed Apr 28, 2004 5:16 am
Location: canberra, australia

Post by wim » Tue Feb 12, 2008 4:03 pm

it probably would not be worth any extra trouble or money.
because the feature did so little i have decided not to run the 'energy saving' feature at startup anyway, to save on having 1 more app running in the background all the time
manufacturers saying their stuff is energy efficient and 'green' seems to be in fashion at the moment, which is a good thing in many ways, but its still up to you to work out what is actually effective and what is marketing hype/pretty packaging to sucker you in.
i expect you could get equal or better result on your gigabyte board just by combination of careful undervolting in bios and stability testing with prime95

alecmg
Posts: 204
Joined: Thu Mar 13, 2008 5:56 am
Location: Estonia

Post by alecmg » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:07 am

Hi
Saw a review on Gigabyte DES ad Asus EPU
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1348/ ... index.html

But watt numbers are way too large. X48 doesn't use 54 watss to begin with, so I fail to understand where does this energy saving (at idle no less) comes from. Either they have REALLY inefficient PSU are there is more in game here. They do have that Q6800...
Also no word on performance. I believe one simple cpu or gaming test with power thingy on and off would show right away the performance is dropping along with power consumption...

yuu
Posts: 132
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:03 pm
Location: eu

Post by yuu » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:16 pm

come on 50Watts? is this a joke, 50watts for what? turning 2-4phases off?

xit2050
Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 3:45 am
Location: Belgium

Post by xit2050 » Fri Mar 21, 2008 12:08 am

I turned it off.
When I got my board I tested this DES feature and ran SuperPI 1MB.
Normally the E8400 does this in just 15-16 seconds at stock.
With DES running it took about 43 seconds to complete.

Is this normal behavior for this piece of software?

halcyon
Patron of SPCR
Posts: 1115
Joined: Wed Mar 26, 2003 3:52 am
Location: EU

Post by halcyon » Sun Mar 23, 2008 11:00 pm

I just finished reading 7 reviews of EP-35-DS4 (sorry, too tired to find the URLs again, try testseek.com).

Points of interest (some already covered):

1. Does NOT work in Linux currently (i.e. not software available to control the stepping of power phases)

2. CAN be used along with Intel EIST and does in fact result in slightly lower power consumption with both used at the same time.

3. Gigabyte motherboards already use 20W less power than similar chipset Asus motherboads. Using DES only widens the gap in favor of Gigabyte

4. P35 boards already use c. 20W less power than X48 boards. DES on X48 board does not bring power usage to the same level as P35 with DES

5. DES can only be activated with standard voltage/clocks (i.e. no overclocking)

6. If you use the hardest saving settings (extra idle feature) then you'll take a hit in CPU intensive apps (like games and benchmarks) which is more than 10%.


Having said all that, I'll order GA-EP35-DS4 for myself now, because X48 draws too much power (use DDR3 doesn't funnily enough alleviate this issue), Asus boards use more power than comparable Gigabyte boards in every test I've read and EP35-DS4 is now the rev 2.1 of P35-DS4 so most of the bugs should be worked out.

zenzike
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Nov 15, 2008 3:31 am
Location: Oxford

Post by zenzike » Sat Nov 15, 2008 3:35 am

According to phoronix [1], your first point isn't quite right: DES is enabled in Linux, since it's hardware controlled. The only problem is that it can't be turned on/off from Linux, since this requires Windows software.

Has anybody had any luck finding a way of turning it on in Linux? Occasionally it turns itself off (if I have to hard reboot), and it's a pain going back into Windows just to enable DES.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... reen&num=1

Esben
Posts: 83
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2007 11:35 am
Location: Denmark

Post by Esben » Sat Nov 22, 2008 8:11 am

I've been using Gigabyte DES for the 2 weeks, having it autolaunch and enable at boot. According to the meter in the application it's saving me about 2.3W, and has during the two weeks saved 83.3W. Not but any means earth-shattering, and I've even enabled maximum CPU voltage reductions and CPU throttling. The latter is known to decrease performance, but I've got plenty anyways. :-)

All in all, I'll just continue running it, even though the savings are minimal. I can still play 1080p movies and playback music.
The CPU voltage reduction is easy to enable, and doesn't require BIOS access.

I suppose the power savings are more significant on 12 phase motherboards.

yuu
Posts: 132
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2007 5:03 pm
Location: eu

Post by yuu » Mon Nov 24, 2008 5:50 am

hi

the power savings are always minimal to none, between 2/3/6 3/4/6 4/5/6 5/6, there is always 1 watt difference. the same with 12 phases....

the main reason for this 1 watt is the voltage drop, that is 1.328 with 6, and 1.312 with 5 phases, so you can see clearly how exacly it lowers power. that is entirely a market trick, just like 2oz is.

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