Build an Environmentally-Friendly PC 249
ThinSkin writes "While gas-guzzling cars are greatly to blame for releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, computers play their role in warming up the Earth too. ExtremeTech has an informative how-to article on building a green PC that will not only help save the planet, but will also slim down that energy bill. An important component, or culprit, to consider is the power supply, so investing in an 80 PLUS PSU is a step in the right direction. The article also discusses how to configure Windows Vista to utilize its power-saving options."
Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:4, Insightful)
Efficiency in new PCs has it's place, but it is nothing compared to the benefits of re-using old hardware which can be perfectly good for most tasks as long as you arent in love with Microsoft Bloat, ExXxtreme edition.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
168 Watts is not efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the real value or point of the story is (Score:5, Insightful)
By effectively ignoring this opportunity simply because its not a huge savings for each individual, we miss an opportunity to save hugely in both environmental costs, and overall operations costs for those companies supplying our electricity.
Eventually, both will translate into a better world, in some small way or other, and both should stave off utility bill cost increases, if not stop the growth of electricity usage.
Re:168 Watts is not efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
By the way, I'm looking to sell the epia system (1gb ram, 30gb hdd, slim dual layer dvd burner in a travella case), if anyone is interested reply to this post.
Re:Buy a laptop - end of story. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not hook up a $30 Watt meter and find out how well his design worked? Do an idle test and then run various benchmarks to see how the Green Machine works in reality.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that modern users have needs that won't be fulfilled by the old hardware. Sure, if you just browse the web and play solitaire, then an old PC is going to be fine. But these days people do things they didn't do in the past, like edit HD video, and manage thousands of RAW images from digital cameras. Those old PCs aren't going to cut it.
Re:Is global warming REALLY so much of a threat? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Buy a laptop - end of story. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not at all surprising, but not for the reason you think. Laptops work by using a battery to moderate the power consumption. You drain the battery down to typically 95% or so before your charge circuit kicks in and brings it up. That means that unless you measure over a long period of time, you will get a false low reading because the external brick is in trickle power mode.
Even if you measure over a long period of time, however, a laptop will still always be more efficient than a desktop for a number of reasons:
That last one bears restating. While it is true that switching supplies do draw power from the mains that is somewhat proportional to the current drain on the output, they are most definitely not linear. This means that efficiency for smaller supplies is significantly better than for larger supplies. While you don't want to undersize a supply, oversizing the supply will result in fairly significant power waste [silentpcreview.com]. By being able to ignore the need for extra peak power (because of the battery), you would expect the efficiency of a laptop power supply to be several percent better (on the average) than a desktop even if all other factors were equal.
The only real question, then, is why desktops don't all have built-in backup batteries in them. It would be far more efficient than a UPS, and it has benefits in terms of power supply efficiency as well....
Inconsequent (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary: too much hot are to be green.
Thinkpad vs Prescott (Score:3, Insightful)
In this room sit two very different computers:
I still love using that Thinkpad, because it hardly even needs a fan, whereas the desktop is practically heating the room [linuxvirus.net].
Just thinking about it makes me want to sell my desktop on ebay and use the money to stock up on old Thinkpads to save for the future.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry dude, but just because *you* might be doing those things, doesn't make you any less the exception. The fact is, *most* people would be just fine with old hardware, because most people really do just browse the web, check their email, and write documents with their PC.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
And then turn it off when it is not in use.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
A 400-800 Mhz CPU with 256 Mb RAM will do 90% of the stuff you do on a PC (unless you're a gamer). I can run Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu or Windows 2000, OpenOffice, Firefox and many other applications without any problems.
This is on the kind of PC you can often pick up lying in the street or at you local landfill.
Misguided... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just a few days ago, I was looking for new power supplies. The cheapest I found 80%+ PSUs like Seasonic were over $40, meanwhile, 70% efficient PSUs are $10 (both prices including S+H). It will take quite a while to pay off the difference in electricity, even here in CA, and my PSUs don't seem to survive very long to begin with.
Incidentally, is this guy a complete moron???
From TFA:
They certainly can, but most don't. Mine max-out around 90W + 30W LCD.
Everything drains more power than needed. Nothing is 100% efficient, nor can it possibly be.
As opposed to non-certified PSUs that run at 500W when the system only needs 20? What? That doesn't even remotely make any sense.
An efficient 500-watt PSU always drains more than 500 watts of power as well...
Well, he's just completely defeated the purpose of this "green PC" by telling people to throw away perfectly good working components. Good job.
Also, it's hard to take his "green PC" seriously with a Core 2 Duo, instead of something like a Turion (or a Geode like the OLPC), which would uses about 1/4th the power. Saying it's "green" because it is lower power than a P4 is setting the bar pretty low...
This is an awfully brain-dead article for
Re:Vista won't save you power! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is global warming REALLY so much of a threat? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm on the Al Gore diet: I eat as much as I want, and pay somebody else to starve.
Re:Most environmentally friendly solution. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Three things to consider for a green PC (Score:1, Insightful)
1. The monitor uses a lot of energy, so a laptop is better as it uses a flatscreen panel - or a PC with a flat LCD panel.
Uhuh. Except the vast majority of people reading this do so on an LCD already. Also, you'd be surprised at how much power a moderately large LCD actually draws.
2. The power supply on most PCs is designed for a full draw, so it is far better to get a laptop which has a power supply for a smaller draw than a giant 300W PC power supply.
This may come to you as a surprise, but a 300W power supply does NOT draw 300 Watt. It _can_ draw that much, but it doesn't do so all the time, that depends on how much the system draws. It doesn't matter what the maximum power rating is for a power supply, what matters is it's efficiency.
3. Memory is cheaper than CPU
Water is cheaper than a car.
so it is far more efficient to buy a PC with a decent AMD chip that has low power consumption and then cram it full of as much RAM as it can address, than it is to buy an Intel quad core chip you don't really use with minimal RAM.
Apples are more efficient than Oranges.
Seriously, efficient how? You are talking about cost first, whereas supposedly we were talking about energy efficiency, so which one?
AMD has produced it's share of power consuming monsters. Heh, I'll even go as far as saying that Intel has consistently had CPUs that outperformed AMD when it comes to MIPS/Watt (mostly in the embedded line, but still).
And FYI: RAM is a very important part of the power consumption of a modern system.
And remember your graphics card has it's own power draw.
Okay...
Basically, RAM is usually 1000 times faster than a hard drive
Yeah, but there is a reason why systems have hard drives...
and can be used for swap files
If you think that an OS swapping to RAM is an efficient way of computing, ehm, well, think again. Swap files are for when the OS runs out of memory. Swapping to RAM doesn't make any sense.
and to speed processes
More RAM will allow more processes, or more of a process to stay in memory, instead of being swapped out to disk. It might be true that under average conditions that's a good thing in terms of energy consumption, but I wouldn't count on it.
I'd say that the average PC is not being utilized very much during the time it's turned on. Swapping to disk doesn't (have to) happen if the user isn't using the machine. RAM is being powered all the time, though.
On the coin-side, any (not so) modern x86 CPU uses fairly low power when not in use.
so cram it more full of RAM if you want to extend the life of your system and avoid power-intensive disk access.
So more RAM will probably help performance, but the reduced energy usage is highly debatable.
Consider a flash USB drive as well - very low consumption.
For what? I suspect that flash memory will turn out to be more energy efficient than magnetic drives, but getting it in the capacities that people are used to get from HDDs is not very practical. (yet)
And use rechargeable batteries for your optical cordless mouse and other devices - ignore the warnings, they work fine.
Okay. You are covering the warranty then?
I wish the moderators were educated enough to not encourage this type of non-knowledge and misinformation. Mod the stuff up that is actually informative!