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

Nothing is easier

[Bin Naden]

Nothing is easier than building a green PC, just take out the can of green spray paint.

"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"

[upside]

You're right. From the manufacturer's point of view being greener is a competitive advantage. It's up to consumers - and depending on your political views, government regulation - to make sure it's a big advantage. Don't use the "out to make money" an excuse to disregard environmental considerations and personal responsibility when making purchases. "Manufacturers of hybrid cars are just out to make money, I might as well buy an SUV". On the other hand, as an employee you can also affect the behaviour of your company. Keep asking what the company is doing to reduce waste. Phrase it so it sounds appealing - saving power and improved efficiency save costs for the company.

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?

I don't have a green PC

[L4t3r4lu5]

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.

Re:I don't have a green PC

[heapcat]

However, I DO ride a motorcycle, pumping out far less CO2 than almost any other motorised road vehicle. Not quite true. http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~siah/MiniProjects/MotorcyclePollution.html In urban setting yes, but in rural or highway driving they pump out more CO2 pollution. About 50% more.

Remember less gas != less CO2. Just check your lawn mower.

Re:I don't have a green PC

[Anonymous Coward]

>Remember less gas != less CO2.

Of course it does. That's why you need to read the spreadsheet instead of just the link. They're not calculating CO2 but CO2 equivalents. Basically the motorcycles that they measured don't have catalytic converters so they put out more CO HC and NOx. These are then converted to something called "global warming potential" by multiplying them by 3, 12 and 296 respectively. Oh, and I can't get at the original article. But I can get at the second link in the spreadsheet and guess what... the number 296 is for N2O not for NOx. NOx is thought to be greenhouse neutral so the number should be zero. Plug that into the sheet et voilà. Bikes are 10% cleaner than cars. Never ever believe global warming believers at their word.

Green == production and Green power

[emj]

The most important part of getting a Green computer is the cost to the environment to produce the computer. Buying new computers just to get a green computer is hence very stupid. Better than try to build a green computer would be to use an old computer and go over to green electricty. If you are going to buy a slow VIA computer yo umight as well have an old computer.

The problem with costs today is that no long term costs are included in prices, copper mines that poison areas bigger than Los Angeles have no obligation to pay for what they destroy. The mining inudstry is very very dirty, they some are situated near natural reserves, which mean we are going to have to fix everything after they have shut down.

There are mines in Sweden that are still being cleaned up, 30 years after shutting down.

hmm.

[apodyopsis]

build modular components that can be combined, recycled and handed down. the trick to being green is to mandate power efficiency and buy/recycle intelligently. for computers it maddens me that people get a top of the range high power monster to browse the net and do word processing, when their old PC would of done the job fine. MS and their ilk persuade people to upgrade by relying on things like redundant feature creep and security FUD to stop them using older versions, but in reality older versions could be relied on to do the work if security patches were updated. you do not need a quad core 2GB machine to read email, but you do need a whizzy machine to run vista and thats were MS makes their money. use that older PC as a work horse for 5 years instead of 1 and you have been five times more green. on another note with LCD screen, I was thinking the other month if anybody has every consider a LCD monitor where the backplate can be tilted down flat with a mirror surface to shine sunlight up into the back of the screen - aka a natural backlight? i ask as thats one of the major power drains on a laptop and you would not need that much sunlight to make it readable. roll on an epaper laptop with flash storage for extreme low power/long battery usage. how an "Asus EEE-Paper"?

OLPC XO laptop

[lobiusmoop]

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.

Kermit writes

[MT628496]

Am I the only one that chuckled at this?

Re:Mac mini

[clare-ents]

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/

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.

Re:Green Software + Hardware

[Stachybotris]

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. That's such an insipidly great idea (especially when you stop and consider that all of your consoles, your TV, your stereo, and pretty much every other electronic device in your house is running a rectifier of its own) that you just know it won't even be considered. From the hardware standpoint, however, it wouldn't actually be that difficult to implement - you'd just have to get a standardized power cable and outlet. Oh, wait, we have those already - we use them in racks.

And from an economical/'green' standpoint, that's just another cost that can be rolled into the price of a new home. Everybody wins!

Re:Energy Efficiency

[demon driver]

I am not a big fan of VIA As far as I understood TFA, the low-consumption VIA CPUs actually don't need big fans.

Notes from the Thinkpad manual

[GameboyRMH]

And you can beat a burglar to death with it. 12-c: Using your Thinkpad as a Weapon

Your Thinkpad can be used in self defense, should the situation arise. If your model is not equipped with a solid-state disk, or a conventional hard disk with a safety accelerometer, the computer should be put into standy or hibernation mode, or ideally powered off before use as a weapon.

Technique

Grasp the Thinkpad firmly with both hands at the front corners, and swing down on your target, striking with the underside and rear corners. Do not swing the Thinkpad by any cords or dongles. Advanced users may hold the unit by the front with one hand for fast melee attacks.

After Battle

Open the unit and ensure that all internal components are seated properly, as some may have come loose during battle. Clean any spills with a slightly damp cloth and dry immediately. If bodily fluids should find their way inside the laptop, hold it upside-down and let the fluids drain out, remove the battery and send it to the nearest Certified Repair Center.

Refer to section 5-a on installation and removal of internal components.

*Note that battle damage is only covered under the Extended Service Warranty.

Quick and cheap advice

[Aceticon]

Here's a couple of quick and cheap tricks for turning your existing computer greener:

• Get one of these Intelli Panel or similar (there are other brands). Basically it's an "intelligent" panel where you plug your computer to a master socket and all the peripherals to the other sockets. When the computer is on, all the other sockets get power, when the computer is off, all the other sockets have no power. If you add up the trickle power consumed in standby mode by the power sources of all the peripherals (usually at least 3 - monitor, printer and loudspeakers) you will see that this thing pays itself after a while (for the typical techie setup this thing pays itself in no time)
• Under-clock your CPU. Really! Just do the exact opposite of all those over-clocking articles: reduce the frequency (say, 10%), reduce the Voltage if possible, remove the enormous fan from the top of your CPU cooler. The power vs frequency behaviour of a CPU is non-linear - especially at the top of it's frequency range - so a small reduction in speed = a large reduction in power consumed. See http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWDT05003_WinHEC05.ppt (page 13) for an example. Ditching the fan and getting a quieter machine in the process is just a pleasant side effect of this.
• Under-clock the GPU and memory of your graphics card. (i bet that at this point most hard-core gamers out there are doubting my geek credentials). Ditch the fan if you can. Same rationale as for the CPUs.
• If you still have a CRT monitor, get an LCD one instead. No explanation needed here IMHO

This should be enough to save you quite some $$$ in your energy bill and polish up your green credentials.

For a more radical approach, consider getting a notebook instead of a desktop for your next upgrade: notebooks will, by design, consume less power than desktops.