Final Thoughts

GIGABYTE has turned green with this new series of high-performance boards to hit the market. No, I don't mean green PCBs, I mean they are going in a whole new direction with their marketing. While they are still pushing extreme performance on their motherboards they are also looking at improving the overall power consumption. With PC's getting faster CPUs, higher clocked memory and faster graphics cards they are also starting to use more energy than ever before. In fact, some systems with Dual GPU graphics cards need nearly 1000 watt power supplies just to keep them happy; that's a lot of wasted energy, especially if there are measures you can use to reduce this without sacrificing overall performance.

The X48-DQ6 is GIGABYTE's first board to incorporate the DES system and it's not going to be their last according to their technical department who were kind enough to give us a call before we received this board to give us a full rundown on how this technology was designed to be used. Not only will we see it on budget boards that will definitely see the extra voltage savings and use them (as most of the time they aren't even on full CPU load to do internet or word documents), but even the enthusiasts are able to take advantage; a mildly overclocked CPU can still work with DES, and quite well at that. It just depends on how far you want to push things.

Overall the X48-DQ6 does perform better than the X38-DQ6, especially in the overclocking department thanks to Intel's hand picking of the best chips. However, if you're looking for a board with more features this board is simply an X38-DQ6 with a higher running chipset, there are no more technical advantages to the X48 over the X38.