Gigabyte DES tested - Not quite right

Keywords: Gigabyte DES X48 energy saving c-states
Our colleagues at Anandtech have gotten their hands on a new motherboard that features the Dynamic Energy Saver(DES) technology, the results are a mixed bag.
The power savings themselves are small, but as long as throttle is on, it becomes a bad idea. Loosing 13% of your performance by achieving a small gain in power consumption, 23% with DES3, and I'm just looking at the best performance result.

Throttling is an issue widely debated in the "green computing" community, or better, in the "my battery has to last longer" community.
Throttling cannot be used to the extent were the power savings don't make up for the power saved, since when you have the computer running slower, it has to run for more time to make the same calculations, thus eliminating some, if not all, power savings.
Most laptops don't even work with some C-States, because the manufacturer chose to define values in the ACPI table that make them inoperable by the operating system. Most laptops don't have more than the C2 state.
The use of throttling has to be carefully thought, since the time the CPU takes to transition increases as it increases the deepness of the sleep mode and so does the power consumed doing nothing. C-States from where the CPU can quickly awake are the more often programmed in the ACPI tables.

It also would be good to see this working well with overclocking but that is still a work in progress it seems.
This is not a Gigabyte only thing, it is provided by Intel's specification for VRM11.1, brought forth with Penryn CPUs in mind.
That will grant support from other manufacturers if they choose so.
One has to wonder though, if the lack off power consumption in the 45nm CPUs from Intel, compared to the previous 65nm technology, won't make the technology go away because of lack of usefulness, the power usage reduction is a trend that, hopefully, is here to stay.
We have already seen this happen with the BTX standard, being mostly scrapped because of high implementation cost and lack of necessity as time went on.