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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."
Tagan 800w PSU, Core2Quad Q6600, NF4650SLI motherboard, 8800gtx, backlit keyboard, wireless mouse (with transformer).
However, I DO ride a motorcycle, pumping out far less CO2 than almost any other motorised road vehicle.
I also don't have a TV, as my PC does everything I need it to. MORE savings. It's not about a green PC, it's about reducing load on the grid. I do it by having less equipment, not greener equipment.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
125W? For a _really_ green PC, check out the XO-1. It is not just physically green, it runs at 2-3W. Another upshot of this is that the battery life is 9 to 10 hours.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
My family runs a foundation which I work for part time. As part of that work I have helped construct and outfit some clinics in a few mining towns. Two that stick out in my mind are in Peru and in Namibia. Without being there, seeing it, and treating the people who live in the surrounding areas I don't think most westerners can even imagine the extent of damage mining really does.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I had a friend who was interested in church organs. Evidently even early organs has pneumatic "switches" that would switch the airflow to multiple pipes from a single key. My friend said that if Babbage had consulted an organ builder and used pneumatic components he would have been able to build a working computer at the time. And they were very green, the air from the larger early organs came from water power, displaced by water filling an air-filled chamber. Smaller organs used "chorister powered" bellows.
We colocate and run dedicated servers on Mac Minis. Electricity prices in London data centres are crippling. In a standard 2kW rack we get 55 Mac Minis - 37W each. The guys in the rack next door have 6 Dell 1950s. They look at us enviously and mumble about the cost of Windows server licences. On the other side we've got people with a HP blade server (just one!) unhappy that they haven't enough power to fill it with blades, whereas we've got 3 times as many CPU cores and a massively lower hardware cost.
http://www.mythic-beasts.com/
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
125 watts at full load being "green"?! That is not even remotely green even if it included the consumption of the monitor. The "green" deal is nothing but another tricky way to suck money out of customers on yet another computer they don't really need. Keep your old machine; there's alot more "green" in doing that.
Just for comparison: I have a 1.9ghz AMD-equipped machine with 1GB of RAM running on a 5400 RPM 2.5" drive and a capable graphics card that I use, among other demanding things, for playing World of Warcraft (hold the jokes for a while). This machine idles at 45 watts and reaches just under 70 watts when both CPU and GPU is stressed to the limit. The monitor I use is rated for 42 watts at full brightness, which I never have it set for due it being too bright for me. This setup, -including- the monitor, never hits 100 watts.
And from an economical/'green' standpoint, that's just another cost that can be rolled into the price of a new home. Everybody wins!
Then keep the machine you have and turn on system standby/sleep functions.
One practical issue I've run into here is that power management support on linux is simply horrible. I've never, ever had power management work properly on any pc hardware with linux. And to be fair, I don't think it's the fault of the kernel developers or the distros. Apparently the hardware manufacturers refuse to publicly document the registers that need to be saved when their chipsets go to sleep. One thing that really does work well in linux is AMD's cool'n'quiet technology, which makes the cpu use dramatically less power when it's idle.
I have some experience with building low-power systems. The system I'm posting on uses 62 W when I get up for a cup of coffee and let the screen go blank, leaving the cpu idle. Peak is 105 W. This is a snappy, modern dual-core x64. Basically the advice in the ars technica article is correct. I do have two quibbles with their advice, though.
(1) The most important piece of advice missing from the article is to get a power meter such as a kill-a-watt, and take some actual measurements. For instance, I had no idea until I took measurements that the set of speakers I was using was drawing 24 W all day and all night, even when the computer was turned off.
(2) Telling people to buy SSDs is simply ridiculous at this point. As they say in the article, a 2.5" platter drive draws about 1 W when it's not being accessed (which is almost all the time). Paying hundreds of extra dollars to shave milliwatts off your power consumption is just silly. There's a lot more low-hanging fruit to pick.
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