Am getting a new PC setup because the prices are so competitive. But there are now so many motherboards with so many different features. For instance, do those components as solid caps, rds mos, ferrite cores and extra oz of copper really work? From an engineering point of view, how much of a different do these components help?
I'll only say something about solid caps, since the other stuff more looks like marketing buzzwords rather than engeneering stuff to me. Anyway, solid caps are supposed to have a longer lifespan than the good old electrolytes (asus markets their boards with them as having a lifetime of 5000 hours at 105 degrees, and 500000 hours at 65 degrees). If a board has electrolytes, it doesn't necessarily mean it won't last long, as long as it uses high quality ones, but nowadays solid caps are almost standard on most boards. Lifetime of caps (both solid and electrolytes) depends _a lot_ on other factors than quality too, most important (as you can see by those asus ads) is temperature - which in turn depends on board cooling (including your cpu fan or case fans which may or may not provide airflow to these parts), and the load on the vrm (in particular overvolting the cpus with the highest TDPs will be stressful, as this may exceed what a vrm is really designed for). So, if you DO get temperatures of these caps up to 105 degrees celsius for whatever reason, even solid caps will fail at some point (after all, 5000 hours is just a bit more than half a year if that's running 24/7).
The second help i needed is the energy saving features like drmo(msi), des(gigabyte) and epu(asus) how are they different from Intel built in power saver? Which is better and safer from an engineering point of view?
Technically, what all of these epu/des/drmos systems can do is switch off some of the phases of the vrm (without this, a board would always run all its phases (typically 8 to 12 on todays boards) even at low loads, which apparently isn't very efficient), if not much power is required. There was a comparison of this here:
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1587/1/asus_epu_6_vs_msi_drmos_vs_gigabyte_des_advanced/index.html.
So, these systems appear to work and give some advantage. Asus at least also undervolts and underclocks if you use the tuning utility, which technically doesn't really have anything to do with the EPU. Though I'm not a very big fan of these systems, there are other methods to reduce power (for instance, the X38 chipset is a power hog compared to P35). Also, I'm not really sure how much of these power saving measures actually requires some effort from the manufacturer and aren't just part of the more advanced vrm circuits they use...
