Power Consumption

Right, the graphs could be something right out of a gay-pride march, but bare with me in my reasoning for the colourfulness.

The board we are looking at (Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R) is in the usual red, and everything else is coloured according to manufacturer so the different energy saving technologies (if employed) are separated so you can see which is "better". Bear in mind that the list is agnostic to board cost and component weighing - for example this means we should expect the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 with its multiple RAID controllers, PCI-Express switch and four lots of Gigabit Ethernet to consume more power than the basic GA-EP45-DS3R we are reviewing here.

If energy use is a concern for you though, the graphs can easily show which board will save you the most money by using less. All the tests were performed with a specific set of hardware (CPU, memory, graphics card, PSU) in order to keep the results as uniform as possible. In addition the BIOS was reset to its default values (no performance tweaks adversely increasing power consumption) and where necessary we enabled and disabled the energy saving options included.



MSI's DrMOS and GreenPower still crunches the rest of the field when it comes to optimal power consumption, and feature wise the P45 Platinum is pretty well aligned to the DS3R or DS4 range from Gigabyte.

Either way, the DS3R is pretty power efficient under load when it's DES Advanced is enabled - saving some 14W of power, however at idle there is very little difference.

C2E and C4E States and Intel VRD 11.1

Two days before this review went live, Gigabyte emailed us a PDF about "The Importance of (Intel's) VRD 11.1", which sends the CPU into an even lower power S4 power state after a certain period under idle condition, however this is only available on the most recent CPU cores. Our Q9550 C1 didn't feature it and nor did our QX9650, but we did find our E8500 C0 did offer the option in the Gigabyte BIOS . The S4 state should be available on the Q9650, certain E800D and E7000D series products from Intel and will turn the phase use back from a standard pair to just one, saving an extra couple of watt.

We tested the E8500 with just C1E enabled, then C1E and C2E then finally C1E/C2E and C4E all on to see what the difference is. According to Gigabyte the C4E state with its DES software enabled should drop the phase use down to just a single phase, rather than the usual two when the system is idle.


Unfortunately even after leaving the system for half an hour and even unplugged the Ethernet and disabled System Restore so NOTHING was interrupting its idle state, we could not get the single gear to turn on. We're currently working with Gigabyte to understand why we could not get the C4E state working.