MSI DrMOS

Now we come to our newest player in the Green PC market, that being MSI. We haven't seen any green offerings from MSI until now; this could be because they haven't mastered the technology, or simply they would rather get it right the first time. We hope it's the latter in this case.

MSI has gone for a different approach to its power saving technology by changing the way the board processes energy. Rather than using a traditional top and bottom Mosfet layout with a driver IC to control the voltage flow, MSI has chosen to go with Integrated Driver Mosfet technology on this board.

How this works is a Driver Mosfet which has built into it a single IC chip comprising a top, bottom and Driver IC chip. This chip is slightly bigger than a single Mosfet but takes up less real estate on the board thanks to being a single chip rather than three having to be used. Combining this along with Hi-C Cap capacitors and solid state chokes, we get a cooler running board along with the ability to run a much more stable system.

Powering the CPU is a total of six phases which are able to be shut down one at a time and powered up one at a time to help reduce overall system power consumption. When in idle, the board can lower itself to two phases and increases one phase at a time, depending on how much the system needs. MSI has gone some extra steps to add in two phase voltage stability on the memory to keep things as stable as possible.

MSI uses its Core Centre to control; what they refer to as GreenPower, the name for the energy saving part of it. In all, the total technology system is called DrMOS technology.

The Test Board

Our test board from MSI is the P45 Platinum which we reviewed a few months ago. The same set of tests have been run on the MSI board as with the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards to determine just how far each board can go in FSB and CPU clockspeeds with both DrMOS operating and disabled. Along with this, we did tests on the amount of power used at idle and load with DrMOS enabled and disabled as well as temperatures of the major components.