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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!"

6 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Everyone wants to save megawatts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I can save 13 megawatts per month

    Yes, somehow he's saving on average ~17.5kW/h. I'd love to know where he managed to dig up a 17000+W power supply...
  2. Re:slashdotted by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    it's no loss, the article was crap

  3. 80 Plus by Hatta · · Score: 4, Informative

    He didn't mention 80 Plus power supplies. Not only will you save power, your case will be cooler.

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  4. what's the mess with cpu overclocking? by gzipped_tar · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

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  5. Re:Not so silly by Zadaz · · Score: 4, Informative

    People are so hard on this article because, for the effort it's taken to write it, the author could have gone outside and planted a tree and done much much more for the environment in total than this article ever will.

  6. Re:Start doing your part in saving the planet now! by Burz · · Score: 2, Informative

    However, the article doesn't have any elements that would entice the reader to buy more stuff. He's not very pointed about it, but is essentially saying that if you need the processing power then moderate overclocking is a pretty 'green' option.

    Some people on the CPDN forums track their system efficiency in terms of work units per Watt-hour and have noted the dramatic increase in efficiency in opting for a quad-core CPU even over a dual. TFA's advice has a lesser but similar effect and I would recommend it to anyone running CPU-intensive applications.