I just have me thinking, we all over-clock our favourite systems, pimp them up and make them look good over the crowd; but to make the viewers and most greenies happy is that you have a onboard chip that monitors the system when you are away and changes the settings to acquire minimal consumption. Now rather than applying stand-by in your computer, it now has its own chip to control the clock-speed and power usage of the board when you are away or not really using as much power as you play games.
With power saving chips now in the market and some review analyst say that these are good prospects but cannot be considered as the silver bullet in power consumption (and I did not get this from another article) well, for others, is like they are saying that these are a great way to have modern IT products to have saving capabilities when running in idle operation; we could argue on how are the potential flaws and strong points of having onboard engines to save power. To go back to the basics, the power saving modes or engines that is built in now modern chipsets and boards, is a small chip that is located in the Southbridge or near it, that just change the core multiplier to in-turn lower the clock speed and then lower the power wattage in the CPU or for more recent range of power saving chips like ASUS’s EPU, MSI’s green power and Gigabytes dynamic energy saver can save on GPU, memory chip and other peripherals. It is more like a domino effect, the chips core purpose, by having to change the clock speed of any type of device, such as the CPU, to place more head room for the voltage count to go down in-turn to save energy.
So what are the problems with it then? Well to be frank there is no problem, but the variety of ways to save energy can confuse some people, more for the newbie’s. Manufactures like Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI have their own power saving method; each programmed to acquire the signature of a processor to find out its core speed and controls the supply of power in the motherboard, as the same with other peripherals that are installed in the system. There is other way rather than let the chip do all the work for you, but some cases it wrecks the voltage and sure enough you have a problem in your hands. Yes, it is a great way to save power with your wild system draining electricity in the grid, but for me though I would take it a little further and make in own preferences for a power saving mode.
