Right, were you paying attention at the back? Did you spot the 'E' in the product name for Gigabyte's latest P35 motherboard? No? Well, it's easy to miss at first glance, but as far as Gigabyte is concerned the E stands for something important - Energy.

The GA-EP35-DS3R joins a small, select band of Gigabyte boards that are labelled Dynamic Energy Saver, which incorporates a software utility that Gigabyte claims will help you to cut costs by saving electricity.

The software interface looks for all the world like a car dashboard and the car analogy continues with the display, which shows the performance of the system as a rotating crankshaft complete with pistons from an eight-cylinder engine.

This is mirrored on the motherboard by a line of a dozen or so LEDs that change colour depending on system performance, which is nice but only worth worrying about if you have a case with a clear Perspex side panel.

There are three options to the power saver; On Off and CPU throttling. When the power saver is turned on the software drops the power consumption from 105W when idle in Windows to 100W and under load, (in this case PCM05 Vantage); the power drops 10W from 185W to 175W without degrading the system's performance, which is something that cannot be said of the third option - CPU Throttling.

Or maybe CPU Throttled might be a better expression, as the performance takes a real hit when this option is turned on. If you really want to save that much power, it might be simpler to buy a slower processor in the first place.

Also helping out on the efficiency side of things are the components used; lower resistance switches in the MOSFETS, low power loss chokes with Ferrite cores that have up to 25 percent less energy loss over the standard parts, and all solid capacitors.

Back to the board itself, which is a typical Gigabyte P35 board, well put together and nicely laid out. It supports all Intel's Socket 775 processors including the latest 45nm range with FSB speeds of 1,333/1,066/800MHz and will also support the upcoming 1,600MHz FSB speeds via overclocking.

Unlike many boards you see, the GA-EP35-DS3R doesn't use heat-pipe technology to cool the chipsets but rather just two isolated passive coolers on the P35 Northbridge and ICH9R Southbridge, while the MOSFETS are left uncovered.

The four DIMM slots provide support for up to 8GB of 1,066/800/677MHz DDR2 memory as well as DDR2 1,200 via overclocking. There's just a single x16 PCI slot but that leaves room for three standard PCI slots and three x1 PCI-E slots. You get integrated 7.1 audio via a Realtek ALC889A and the same company supplies the controller chip for the Gigabit Ethernet.

Using the ICH9R Southbridge means that the six SATA 3GBps ports can be set up in RAID arrays; the chipset supports RAID 0, RAID 1 and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

Leaving aside the power-saving feature, which you may or may not think is a bit of marketing shenanigans, the GA-EP35-DS3R is basically a good, stable P35 board.