Introduction

Remember that little video we showed you in December? The one with the GIGABYTE Xmas lights? Well, as it happens, it had nothing to do with Xmas lights; those lights are just there to give you an idea of what's going on. What they are for is to give you some kind of a visual element to GIGABYTE's new DES or Dynamic Energy Saver. Ok, you might still wonder what it is and we're going to try to make things a little bit more clear if you bear with us.

First of all, DES is not a fad and it will be available on pretty much all GIGABYTE motherboards bar the really low end models. However, the roll-out will take some time but the good news is that GIGABYTE has already shipped motherboards with DES. Even though the X48 chipset was meant to be part of the launch vessel for DES, it has been delayed. This hasn't stopped GIGABYTE moving forward though, if you have scored a P35 based GIGABYTE board for Christmas or have just recently bought one then it's a very good chance that your board already supports DES. You can find a list of supported boards here which also happens to include GIGABYTE's upcoming X48 boards.

In a couple of weeks time GIGABYTE will start shipping boards with an E before the P in the model name when it comes to the P35 series to make it easier to tell that the board has DES, but they won't be any different than the boards currently shipping. We still haven't answered the question of what DES is, so let's get right to it. As you surely have figured out, Dynamic Energy Saver is something that will save power, but it's not very clear how this works from a marketing name alone, so let's take a closer look at how it all works.