powerd and increase in energy need

[Matthias Gamsjager]

Hi,

my zfs nas has an Asus p5e motherboard (x38 chip) and an intel q9300 (quad
core 2,5Ghz) processor with all the energy save setting enabled in the
bios. Today I connected the power cord to a voltcraft energy meter to see
how much energy the whole system needs in idle mode.

I found out that with powerd running the cpu get clocked down to 499 mhz
with is nice. The funny thing is that this doesn't decrease the amount of
watts the machine need. 2,5ghz or 499mhz doen't matter at all. It gets even
funnier. With powerd running the systems actually needs 4 watts more then
without powerd running.

Isn't the whole point of powerd to to decease the energy needs of a
machine? or is it utterly broken with this cpu generation?