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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!"
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.
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?
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.
* 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.
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."
1) use speed stepping
2) don't overclock as much
wow, great article!
Summary:
Save power on your overclocked PC by not overclocking it.
Also, reducing the power consumption of your PC will reduce the power consumption of your PC by JiggaWatts per Fortnight.
Conclusion:
A meaningful way to save power/money is:
Turn off your computer at the power strip, and go out for a conditioning bike-ride, and be ready to bike-commute.
Certainly, do not waste your time using your computer to complain about not being able to read the article.
"Read the article" - what are you thinking?
*Still* negative function...
If your fan runs faster, your cpu temperature is lower, resulting in less current leakage.