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Reducing the Power Consumption of Overclocked PCs
babyshiori writes "Now, that must sound pretty inane. After all, overclockers employ all kinds of power-guzzling methods to improve their CPUs' overclockability. However, there are many good reasons to do so. In this guide, we will not just look at theoretical tips on reducing power consumption in overclocked PCs, we will also look at how well they work in real-life situations. Best of all, we are shown why they will improve our PCs' power efficiency without any real loss in performance. Start doing your part in saving the planet now!"
This has got to be the stupidest article ever on /.
If you want to improve the efficiency of a cpu, you UNDERCLOCK it. Not over. seriously, what brain dead dumbass posted this to the front page?
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Energy conservation isn't about saving the planet - the planet doesn't care. It's about saving humans. We'll all die out and the planet will quite happily go on without us.
It was going well until I got to 'I can save 13 megawatts per month'. Obviously this article was written by someone who has a deep technical understanding of power and energy consumption, and not just some kid who thinks he is a 'l33t haxor' because he found out how to use the utilities that come with the motherboard to turn his overclocking on and off.
WTF? There're tips there that saves the planet?
If you are really worried about it and you drive, drive less.
1 gallon of gasoline = 131 megajoules = ~36 kilowatt hours.
Waving hands around about efficiency and so forth, that's 1 kilowatt hour of energy per mile driven. So that's 5-20 hours of computer use (assuming between 50 and 200 watts, 500 watts is still 2 hours) per mile driven. Using a more efficient computer is good, but finding a way to not drive 5 miles a day is a considerable amount better.
(If you aren't worried about it, that's fine, but if you are worried about it, for god's sake, do the easy, effective things before you start telling people about the difficult, pretty much a wash things that you are doing.)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
He is saving 26megawatts per month? I didn't know Intel made 13.8KV 3-phase E6850s?
http://www.monkey.org/~timothy/
he posted it. go bother him for being stupid.
I've been hearing a lot of this kind of fluff during earth week.
If you really wanted to save the planet, you wouldn't be overclocking your computer at all or buying a new car because it was hyrid. You would be beating what you have already consumed until it fell apart from overuse.
Most of these "earth saving" techniques seem like nothing more than feel good consumerism. Eco this and green that. Nothing more than words.
And if your computer was burning 24/7 in the development of new energy technologies or new effiencies you would really be saving the planet. And all these real efforts at saving the planet are going to require technology and huge amounts of energy use and chemicals and industry and all that supposedly evil stuff.
Improving the gas efficiency of your Humvee using proper tire inflation.
Thanks to my overclocked PC running at a super high core voltage. w00t!
w00t
* Set your desktop background to something like penguins or polar bears
* Install a screensaver with air conditioning capability.
* Set your beer on top of the case so the cold will seep down into the computer.
* Type slower as fast typing causes heat friction. Also avoid CAPS and waving the mouse pointer around too much.
* Use a lighter color scheme on the desktop instead of dark as dark colors absorb light and generate heat.
slashdotted. Slashdot should have a mirror site so this doesnt happen so often.
There is often one in a family. Remember the 1.13Ghz PIII, the AMD x64. Right now it is the 45nm Core2Duo [wolfdale] processors.
Target undervolting 10% and OC the FSB about 10%. Of course turn on the energy saving features like the C1E reported in the story.
Increasing the voltage by 500 MHz to 3.9 GHz
volts are J/C thank you very much
He didn't mention 80 Plus power supplies. Not only will you save power, your case will be cooler.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Does overclocking indeed improve the performance? Unless you can show that the CPU clock freq. is the true bottleneck of your computing tasks. Often it is not so. Clock rate != performance and vice versa.
For most users the CPU works just fine out of the box. My laptop with a Pentium-M class chip even works underclocked by default to reduce power usage. BTW, it runs Linux of course.
I hope the whole overclocking thing could be stopped if you care about energy consumption.
There's a classical joke that the "MIPS" (million instructions per second) == "Meaningless Information Provided by Salesmen". Similar with clock rate.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I don't know why people are being so negative about this article. It isn't trying to convince you that overclocking is the most energy efficient thing to do, it's trying to show you ways you can be more energy efficient if you do choose to overclock. People who overlock do so because they want higher PEAK performance, not because they enjoy wasting energy 24/7. When you're not in need of that peak performance, it only makes sense to go ahead and be efficient.
The whole article can be summed up by saying:
1) Be sure to enable whatever idle tech your motherboard/processor supports (speedstep, cool'n'quiet) so that it automatically slows down the CPU and power consumption when not under load.
2) Try undervolting, use stability tests to find the lowest voltage your particular CPU can use, rather than simply using the default.
3) If your motherboard/processor comes with some software that lets you configure the clock speed/voltage on-the-fly, go ahead and test stability under different settings and save those configurations and use them when appropriately. I'd add that most video cards have the same type of software these days -- go ahead and overclock them when you're gaming, and be sure to slow them back down when you're done.
Neither of those should be shockingly new ideas to anyone who's been building computers for years, but anyone new to it should find the article informative in the specifics.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
This is because the cpu is not the only energy dissipator in the system and the others exceed it. To take a very simple example: I have a build which takes 30 minutes. During that time, the hard drive is on all the time, so is everything on the motherboard. To be very conservative, assume that at maximum speed the cpu uses 50% of system power.
Now I underclock the processor to, say, 60% of normal speed, and am able to reduce the voltage, and hence the power consumption, by 50%. The system power consumption is now only 75% of what it was. But my build takes around 50% longer. So I use 75% of the power for 150% of the time. The energy consumed in the build is 12% higher with the underclocked cpu.
The concept of getting the most processor speed when needed and powering down unused subsystems whenever possible is the one to give the best power saving. As a further example, replacing an old 4200rpm disk on a laptop with a 7200 rpm disk (where possible) may actually improve battery life because the disc is active for much shorter periods (with twice as much data per track, and 12/7 the speed, it can read the same amount of data in roughly 1/3 the time of the slower drive, which outweighs its 50% higher active power.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If the thermal load per square cm of a cpu is as hot a a nuclear reactor why don't we use them as hot water heaters? Cold water to cool the cpu hot water out to wash my filthy ass.
1) use speed stepping
2) don't overclock as much
wow, great article!
Like IBM p575 or heating pools with data centers?
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
The best thing for you guys to do would be to put your computer to sleep or hibernate when not in use, and don't run distributed computing projects. I am amazed that nearly everyone I know leaves their computer on all the time!
"They're doing their part. Are you? Join the Mobile Infantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship."
For all the time people put into overclocking, they could buy a Mac which is far faster than even the fastest OC hackjob. You even get an OS that is 100% secure, completely immune to viruses of breaches from remote.
Pita Gyros ftw!
One, it may not be possible to drive less. It's easy to tell someone "Oh just drive less" but what if (as with many people), their daily drive is to work? It isn't as though it is trivial to just find someplace to work closer to where you live, or move closer to your work.
The second is that just because cars are the biggest user of energy, doesn't mean it is worthless to optimise where you can. Lightbulbs are a good example. They really aren't that big a power user over all. Your average incandescent lightbulb is 60 watts and you have maybe 20 or so in your house. Even if they were all active all the time at the same time, which they aren't, that's not much compared to a lot of things. However, that doesn't mean that you should just ignore more efficient lightbulb technology. I like CFLs just because they put out much better light (higher colour temperature). Same deal as turning off lights when they aren't in use. I mean ok, let's say you leave three outdoor lights burn all the time. 180 watts x 24 hours x 30 days = 130kWh per month. That's nothing compared to what it takes to run an air conditioner. However, it is unnecessary, and it's easy to turn them off when not needed. It's also easy to replace them with bulbs that use less energy. So let's say you replace them with 25 watt CFLs and only leave them on for a few hours from dusk till when you go to bed you get 75 watts x 6 hours x 30 days = 13kWh per month. Yes, that's only equivalent to driving a few miles less, but it is also easy to do so why not?
I agree that targeting the big things make sense when possible. I am lucky enough to live withing biking distance to my work, so I do. However it isn't always possible to reduce those kinds of things, and even if it it, it doesn't hurt to work on the little things. Yes, maybe doing things like getting more efficient lights, a computer controlled thermostat and such only add up to 20 miles of driving per month. Ok, well that is still not for nothing.
The idea that we should only worry about the big problem is silly. It is like saying the police shouldn't investigate any other crime than murder, unless there's no murder. Just because there's big crime, doesn't mean we shouldn't work on little crime as well. Same deal with efficiency. We should work on gains where we can.
Just in case you read TFA. It states that "When running at full 3.9 GHz, I would save about 26 megawatts a month. Sweet!"
This is incorrect.
26 megawatt is the energy consumption of a medium sized city. Units for saving should in any case be watts, or kilowatthours per month to make it easier to convert to $$$. (note that this is again just watts multiplied by a constant: "kilo" and "hours/month")
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Especially since Cray can pull off water-cooling with style. All those tranquility waterfalls people buy for their home could have a real purpose.
If your fan runs faster, your cpu temperature is lower, resulting in less current leakage.
Lighting is around 1/5th of US electricity production, of that, around half is for commercial lighting, residential about a quarter. Here is a semi recent breakdown US lighting stats
I wonder how much of that commercial figure is for..well.. for spam signage burning all night? I live out in the medium sticks but whenever I go to town that is the huge impression I get, tons of "buy me-acme stuff!" signs running all night long, even when the store/business isn't open. I also *seriously* question the business case or actual need for these thousands of office towers where people have to commute to and from every work day so they can sit in front of a screen and type stuff and read stuff. I think we could save just cubic boatloads of energy if they would actually *implement* the infrastructure for the "information age" and have millions of office commuters just work from home. Much less driving, eliminate a lot of the artificial "need" for the big fatcat ego towers (which have to be paid for and that is reflected in higher costs to the consumer for whatever widget they sell). I know some of that commuting is necessary, but all of it? I bet that if there was a real tax credit for homeworkers that they would discover real quick like that millions more could work where they live.
The only reason I want to save energy is because it costs money. I don't drive a small car because I like it, but because it is not $100 per tank. Global warming is a hoax; just something the liberal media has conjured up by twisting the facts around. If you put the time and effort into the research, you will see exactly what I mean. Polar bears are dieing off because their population is at an all time high and their food supply has remained the same. P.S. they are not friendly and cuddly toy bears!
I heat my house in Winter using my overclocked PC.
:D
I'm sure that I'm saving quite a lot of energy compared to traditional heating systems.
127.0.0.1
I have enabled Gigabyte's on-demand FSB overclocking BIOS option which allows the CPU & memory to work in low FSB (233 Mhz) on most tasks and high FSB (280 Mhz) at high usage.
I have also used RivaTuner to reduce my graphics card's GPU core and shader clocks as well as memory clocks to very low levels when the memory of the card is at low usage levels and to get it back to normal when more than 128MB of video memory is being used. This is better than nVidia's automatic clock adjustments because nVidia relies on whether GPU accelerators are being used which is not a good measure: the GPU accelerators are used even when you play a movie or an old game.
I never lose any FPS and performance but I do gain a lot of energy savings and my noise levels are really low.
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The planet cannot be saved.
You have no privacy.
No concept is entirely new.
Time is against you.
Despair.
Relish in it.
It's all anyone has anymore.
Though the emptiness is the only path that can lead us out of the depths into enlightenment.
Get used to it, get with the program or get out of our way. Saving something means clinging to the past.
The future is forward.
Other than the fact that that totally ignores my point of using the heat for a purpose instead of just bleeding it into the atmosphere.
My Desktop machine already is very power efficient, idling at 38 watts (under full load 73 watts), measured with a standard kill-a-watt like wattmeter - and I'm not using any special components or custom tuning*. Just pay a little bit attention while choosing the components and you can make very energy-efficient (and in consequence silent) computers using standard components. It's not expensive either.
*
AsRock ALiveNF7GHDReady
AMD X2 5200+ G2
2x 1GB DDR2-800
Seagate 3,5" HDD
DVD drive
Seasonic S12II-330 PSU (80PLUS)
Or I could still use my aging but low power Athlon XP 1800+ system. Failing that, I could always use my laptop or Nokia n800.
Surely using Stand By would be a more effective method for saving power while a system is idle. It's much easier to configure and I'd imagine would save a hell of a lot more power. This is assuming the article author defines 'idle' as not being used.