Building a Green PC

Kermit writes "Ars Technica has put together a green DIY system building guide. The idea is to build a PC offering decent energy efficiency as well as solid performance. The 'Green Gaming Box' draws about 125W at full load (not including a monitor); the minimalist 'Extreme Green Box' uses a mini-ITX case and a VIA CPU-motherboard combo for about 30W at typical load. If you want to mix and match components, or modify your current system so that it uses less energy, there are plenty of options for swapping out individual components."

Comments

"Green Computing"

[cccc828]

As long as rain forests are stubbed for easier access to copper mines
As long as local people are poisoned by the toxic byproducts of metal refinement
As long as people in Africa or Eastern Europe dissable old computers without any protective clothing
As long as children assemble computers for $1/hour in Asia

I refuse to equal "green computing" and enviromental friendly.

In truth it is just another catchy phrase to sell you yet a new computer. Buying a new computer does nature more harm than just keeping your old computer.

Re:"Green Computing"

[upside]

There are obviously various dimensions to "going green":
1) Not buying. Reuse instead.
2) Buying as little as possible.
3) When buying, buy environmentally friendly.

You can take a queue from data centers where power and heat are major issues. Instead of having a spinny whirly storage (or even solid state) on every PC, use NAS or SAN. If you've got to have 2nd - Nth PCs, use PXE, NFS and iSCSI for storage. Virtualization can help save power, too.

Re:"Green Computing"

[BVis]

Using a few watts less on your gaming rig is not going to make any difference to your "carbon footprint" or your electricity bill.

That just isn't true. The generation of electricity still releases CO2 into the atmosphere; less electricity generated = less CO2. Not to mention that your electricity bill is (generally) directly proportional to how much energy you use, so if you use less energy, your bill is lower.

What you're saying is that if I have 20 marbles in a bag, and take two out, I still have 20 marbles in the bag. It's just not true.

All these little steps add up over the long run. Reducing your energy consumption by 3% might not seem like a huge difference, but if millions of people do it, it makes a difference. I recently measured how much power my computer rack uses, and found that I could cut usage by 25% through a few simple steps (like making sure the CRT I sometimes use on my firewall is powered down, setting the drives in my system to spin down after a certian amount of idle time, etc.) The whole thing (three computers, two monitors, various networking bits, laser printer) consumes 300 watts at idle. That 100 watts I save from shutting off the monitor adds up to 584 kW/h each year (if it's off 16 hours each day), which in my state keeps 7,475 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and saves me $97 in electricity annually. From only shutting off a monitor!

The shit adds up. Throwing your hands in the air because there's no one thing you can do that's a magic bullet for the energy problem is cynical and lazy.

If you're serious about green, go matte black

[parlyboy]

Get a used Thinkpad.

Lower energy usage. Recycled. Probably faster than the VIA. And you can beat a burglar to death with it.

What's not to like?

Green Software + Hardware

[Ngarrang]

We would not need to worry about the topic of 'green' PCs if we did not have such bloated software that continues to require ever more CPU cycles per second to accomplish their task. There was a time when software was written in to be tight and memory efficient. WordPerfect for DOS comes to mind.

Low-power PCs are a good idea, sure, but we need our software to also be efficient. The two, together, could get us a long way toward truly 'green' computing.

And while I am ranting about bad software design...

AC-to-DC conversion is messy and lossy. Fortunately, we do have servers that can take DC directly from a shared AC-DC power supply. This concept needs to move into the home. Why should my PC, monitor, printer and God knows what else all each have their own AC-DC power converter box? Homes could have a single large converter and then have DC-only outlets for all those appliances that need it.