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Energy Efficient PC's?

Posted by Cliff on from the lowering-that-power-bill dept.

eebly asks: "I'm working with a team at my school to help ensure that some of our new building projects are environmentally friendly. As part of that, we want to include good, energy efficient computers. The new building will be labs, so we can't sacrifice power. We're looking for suggestions on what machines use low amounts of power, techniques to make the machines run with less, and ways to tweak the software to make things like sleep mode get used more effectively."

2 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Display power by goldmeer · · Score: 4
    In my experience, I've noticed that standard CRT monitors use up a large amount of power. To illustrate this, just put your hand over the CRT that you are using to read this message to feel the heat generated. More heat = more power used. LCD folks, don't bother trying this, you won't feel much heat, I specified CRT, OK?

    When I installed my UPS at home, I went from a 25 minute power backup time with the monitir on, to a 42 minute backup time with the monitor off. That tells me that my monitor (17") is almost sucking up as much as my computer. And my computer isn't the most friendly model out there. The processor is old 1st rev PII 300-MHz heater (I think 40 watts), several SCSI drives and SCSI card, TV tuner card, internal DSL modem, ehternet, ATI Graphics card (with heatsink on the card to illustrate how much power it sucks down) CDROM and CDRW (Granted, the power backup numbers were not while copying a CD, but the point is still valid.)

    The answer is to use somewhat aggressive settings on the monitor power off settings (don't bother with screensavers) or to switch to LCD displays.

    Now, there is a hughe amount of power drain when the monitor turns itself back on after DPMS off, so you will have a net power loss if the monitor is only shut down for a few seconds at a time, so don't get too aggressive with those settings.

    Of course, LCD displays are a more expensive up front cost, but the power savings from them are 2 fold:
    First, the display won't be eating up the power.
    Second, you won't need to cool the room as much.

    That's just my experience. Take it as you will.

    -Joe

  2. Linux shutdown possible. by Bryan+Andersen · · Score: 5

    If you are using Linux boxes, it is possible to do a full shutdown on modern hardware by calling the regular shutdown program from a screensaver like program. One would modify one of the activity moniter programs so it will shut the system down if there is no activity for a period of time. This would shut the system down over night, and durring slow days in the lab.

    There is also a patch available that does HD spindown for Linux. From what I hear it now works on IDE drives. That alown will get you 5-10 Watts per machine.

    The nightly scripts run by cron can have their run times changed so they are run just after lab close, then an automated shutdown run. Watch that you provide enough spacing between script runs so the previous one's output is available to the next script. This is important for the accounting scripts. You can even do some simple recoding of them to serialize them to shorten the time it takes to get them all done in the right sequence. This would allow one to have cron start them, then the last would shutdown the system when it is finished.