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!"

Comments

Re:Saving the world

[DarkOx]

The other thing to consider is maybe we should look at increasing the lengh of the hardware life cycle rather then constantly cutting it. We should start demanding that software vendors start producing tight efficent code again so that we don't have to keep replacing our machines to use it. We should demand hardware vendors produce platforms that have a long life span with an upgrade path that enables most components to be resused as much and as long as possible.

These is all speaking of primary systems.

I had my first PC, and 386DX-20 for almost 10 years(MSDOS and later Windows 3.x added).
My second system a Gateway P5-90 for about 5 years(MSDOS and Windows 3.x).
My third system home built Cirix 8686-233 for about 3 years(Windows 95 and later 98)
My fourth system home built K6-2-450 for about 2 years(Windows 2000, later Slackware 8 after ---------frustration with the performance of win2k)(would have kept it longer but it broke)
My fifth system now about 8 years old Athlon-800 (Slackware 10.2 and now 12.0 I am even using compmgr on X and enjoying sexy transparent windows!) (works fine with my lowly geforce2-mx400)

Scary trend in that propriety software world. Other then playing and encoding some video MPEG2 and 4 are fine some of the more recents ones are pretty slow to encode and difficulte to play back properly; I can do just about everthing as well with my 8 year old box as can be done with a brand new one. I chose software that is not wasteful and can thefore get allot of miles out of a machine now. I grant you I am not a PC gamer, I have a Wii for that. I am pretty confident the enviornmental impact of my having replaced this machine at least once if not more then once in the Commercial software world would have been greater then any questionable power efficencies of this older equipment, CRT included. The power draw of PCs has not exactly been trending down in general so its likely new gear would save little there at all if anthing the main offset being an LCD rather then the CRT.