Everyone’s going green these days—it’s a big topic. Global warming, power saving, clean coal; green is a big business market.

Motherboard companies have been touting green boards for the last while, but are the technologies that they use really effective? This week, Tom’s Hardware takes an in-depth look at several motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI to determine if there is any value in building a mainstream machine with "green" platforms.

How much power is really saved? Are there hidden costs like CPU throttling? The results we found may surprise you!