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Gigabyte turns "Green" and introduces an energy efficient motherboard with all the bells and whistles. 

INTRODUCTION

This year, energy efficiency will be a big thing for 2008, and we will be seeing a lot of manufacturers producing energy efficient motherboards over the coming months. Why? you may ask, should this have anything to do with me. Well, everyone knows that wasteful and excessive use of electricity, is one of the major contributing factors towards global warming. It's very unsettling to know that when I use my overclocked rig, the excess heat produced is because my PC is not very energy efficient. So what do we do? Well, several major manufacturers including Intel and their partners have got together and tried to make their products more energy efficient. Don't think that an energy efficient product is less attractive ... in fact it's quite the opposite. The more energy efficient a product, the less heat it will produce ... less heat equals better for overclocking, and great news for enthusiats.

Gigabyte have really pushed for market share over the past year or so. Establishing their Thermal Division, which produces chassis and cooling products, as well as entering the mobile market with their U60 UMPC. Now it seems that they are among the first maufacturers to embrace the whole concept of energy efficiency. Their R&D team have developed an innovative feature called D.E.S. which stands for Dynamic Energy Saver. And they've introduced this feature in a number of their products, including the P35 and X38 chipset based motherboards. I love it when they come up with some fancy names ... always makes me chuckle.

The D.E.S. feature is a combination of Gigabyte's newer BIOS, and software utility that allows "on-the-fly" adjustment of power consumption, which is done automatically for you. You have to see it in action to know what I mean. Gigabyte claims that the D.E.S. improves power efficiency by upto 20% and reduce power consumption by upto 70% ... making it all together "greener" motherboard, and therefore good for the environment. These new D.E.S. enabled motherboards comes with all of the same features found on their existing models ... including the Ultra Durable 2, which uses High quality CPU power module with Ferrite Core Chokes, Lower RDS (on) MOSFETs and Lower ESR Solid Capacitors. All of this means that you'll get a very stable, feature packed motherboard that's a lot "greener" ... So now, you don't have to feel guilty when you switch on your PC.

In this review we'll be taking a look at the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 motherboard. This motherboard uses Intel's P35 chipset and offers support 45nm Penryn processors, as well as 1600FSB and DDR2-1200 (via overclocking). It also features the Silent Pipe chipset cooling and the new Dynamic Energy Saver feature.

Looking at the motherboard layout, the GA-EP35-DS4 looks very simliar to its sibbling ... the GA-P35-DS4. It's virtually identical, except of course the GA-EP365-DS4 has the D.E.S. feature. You'll find two PCIe x16 slots for graphics (or dual for crossfire), three PCIe x1 slots, two standard PCI slots, and four DDR2 DIMM slots. We'll be testing this motherboard with our Quad Core Q6600 processor, 2Gb of OCZ DDR2-1066 ram, a Radeon HD3870 graphics card and a Coolermaster M700 PSU.

OK, let's not waste any more time and see how the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 will perform with this new D.E.S. feature included.