Introduction

Over the last six months the idea of going green with each motherboard manufacturer has picked up. Ideas and thoughts of a cleaner and greener PC industry are now taking hold. GIGABYTE can be thanked for kicking this off. Not only have they been the first to introduce solid state components across the entire line of boards, but also the first to introduce a hardware based voltage switching system that allows the board to physically shut down un-used phases when the CPU is at idle and during lower states of activity; very impressive. GIGABYTE called this technology DES or Dynamic Energy Saver. GIGABYTE has since upgraded to DES Advanced.

Not to be outdone, ASUS followed suit, but by doing things their own way so as not to look like they have followed a rivals company idea. ASUS brought something similar, but in our opinion, far less sophisticated. Where the DES was able to shut down two phases at a time, ASUS has two states running four or eight phases, resulting in a bit of energy wasted. While the CPU needed more than four phases during our testing, it didn't need all eight; six could have done. ASUS call this technology EPU or Energy Processing Unit. Again, an upgrade has been done and ASUS now call this EPU 6.

Today we have added a new contender to the market, that being MSI. It has only been of late that MSI has decided to enter the green PC market and it's very good to see them do it. MSI has decided not to jump straight in, but to work on its energy saving system a bit more to get the bugs out (something we think ASUS and GIGABYTE could have done). With that in mind, MSI has brought to the market what they like to call DrMOS.