  In this paper we are concerned with the analysis of a class of geometric
integrators, at first devised in [14, 18], which can be regarded as an
energy-conserving variant of Gauss collocation methods. With these latter they
share the property of conserving quadratic first integrals but, in addition,
they also conserve the Hamiltonian function itself. We here reformulate the
methods in a more convenient way, and propose a more refined analysis than that
given in [18] also providing, as a by-product, a practical procedure for their
implementation. A thorough comparison with the original Gauss methods is
carried out by means of a few numerical tests solving Hamiltonian and Poisson
problems.
