Gaming Computers Offer Huge, Untapped Energy Savings Potential

Required Snark writes: According to Phys.org, a study by Evan Mills at Berkeley Lab shows that "gamers can achieve energy savings of more than 75 percent by changing some settings and swapping out some components, while also improving reliability and performance" because "your average gaming computer is like three refrigerators." Gaming computers represent only 2.5 percent of the global installed personal computer (PC) base but account for 20 percent of the energy use. Mills estimated that gaming computers consumed 75 TWh of electricity globally in 2012, or $10 billion, and projects that will double by 2020 given current sales rates and without efficiency improvements. Potential estimated savings of $18 billion per year globally by 2020, or 120 terawatt hours (TWh) are possible. Mills started the site GreeningtheBeast.org. You can read the full paper as a PDF.

Comments

And?

[4pins]

So I should swap out my video card to save a little power, drop a few frames and die a virtual death? I think they have their priorities backwards.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a brief study I conducted, Evan Mills could achieve energy savings of 100% by recycling himself into fertilizer.

Re:And?

[Archangel Michael]

So, what you're saying is that dropping from 1000 frames per second, to 950 FPS is all it takes to die?

My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not criticizing you directly, but I expect that most Slashdot readers are more that happy for others (especially those "evil capitalists") to make real sacrifices in order to "save the planet" but are unwilling to make even a mere virtual sacrifice. In other words, I expect most are hypocrites.

Re:And?

[bobbied]

So, what you're saying is that dropping from 1000 frames per second, to 950 FPS is all it takes to die?

My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"

To channel a story from yesterday... IF the tool is Python, the blame is well placed... ;)

Re:And?

[geekmux]

So I should swap out my video card to save a little power, drop a few frames and die a virtual death? I think they have their priorities backwards.

Agreed. Talking to gamers about their systems being inefficient when it comes to power is akin to talking to the guy driving a supercharged Challenger about gas mileage. There are factors that consumers do not give a shit about. Power consumption with gaming rigs would be one of them.

You want people to run more efficient devices? Make the cost of electricity higher. Otherwise, good luck getting people to change. Performance will likely win no matter what, as it does when shopping for gas-guzzling muscle cars.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Dang.... Dude/Dude-et you just described the average environmentalist. Protest folks driving SUV's but don't mind setting a couple of them in a car lot on fire. Complain about the local nuclear plant going on line in the morning, then rushing home to enjoy the air conditioning. Or, complaining about how CO2 is killing the planet then jumping on the gulfstream and head to the Caribbean for a weekend and heading to the 20 bedroom/bath estate for another grueling week of cashing the checks from the speaking fees.

Or my favorite... Buying a EV and driving it twice for show, leaving it in the garage for 10 years because it takes a fleet of SUV's to carry all the staffers places.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"

Good craftsmen don't keep crappy tools.

Re:And?

[Rei]

A lot of things come at no cost though. I find it amazing how many people for example will spend a fortune on their graphics card, motherboard, processor, ram, hard drives, etc... but then run it with a cheapo power supply.

Let's say that you're one of those (probably the majority) that leaves their computer on 24/7. Let's say your gaming computer's average power consumption, between idling and heavy usage, is maybe 200W. Let's say the power supply lasts an average 3 years. Let's say that the difference between a cheapo 75% efficient power supply and an excellent 95% efficient supply is $50. Then the better supply saves 40W on average, or 1051 kWh over its lifespan. At an average US electricity price of, what, 12 cents per kWh, that's a savings of $126. You not only help the environment, but you easily save yourself money.

It's not just power supplies that matter - the same logic can be applied to processors, graphics cards, and other hardware as well. Always check the power consumption - not just for the environment, but for your pocketbook as well. Often it saves money to spend more upfront.

Re:And?

[Archangel Michael]

Give a Craftsman a crappy tool, and he can make it work. Give an apprentice the same tool, and he will likely fail. The difference is not the tool.

The difference is that a Craftsman doesn't rely on the tool, but rather on experience. A poor workman blames his tool, a Craftsman gets it done right in spite of the tool.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, he may be able to get it to work, but any craftsman will tell you that the end result will be better when better tools are used.

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

From the article (I know, I know, but I was curious):

"The huge bottom line here is that gamers don't have to sacrifice performance to save energy," Mills said. "You can have your cake and eat it too. In fact, the efficient systems run cooler and quieter, both of which are desirable attributes among gamers."

...and...

They were able to achieve a 50 percent reduction in energy use while performance remained essentially unchanged. Additional energy savings were achieved through operational settings to certain components, yielding total savings of more than 75 percent.

Which is to say, quite right, it sounds like they are talking about diminishing performance a bit, but if they've figured out some decent ways to cut the amount of energy the system is using, it would sound to me like they may have created some additional headroom for overclockers dealing with overheating. After all, a cooler system may indicate you're leaving untapped potential on the table.

Having looked through their site, it appears that all they've really done is calculate the cost per watt for the performance offered by various components, and have made some swaps to get similarly- or better-performing components that operate at lower wattages, but their research is far from comprehensive. For instance, they posted a market survey that covers the efficiency of 9 PSUs, but PSUs are already rated based on their efficiency (e.g. Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze), and there are significantly more comprehensive lists out there that address the topic of how well the PSUs live up to their claimed standard (and that are also updated regularly as new PSUs hit the market). Likewise, you can find similar work done for other components.

If their site had done a better job of pulling those various resources together so as to provide a better bang-for-your-buck on your utility bill list and was comprehensive enough that I didn't feel like they were leaving out the vast majority of the products aimed at gamers, I'd have been much more favorably-inclined towards them, but this kinda seems like a weekend project done by a father and son team who have environmental aspirations. Merit worthy, certainly, but not worth much consideration from gamers (yet?).

Re:And?

[Chris Mattern]

That can mean a poor workman finds excuses. But it also means a good workman has quality tools and takes good care of them.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even increasing electricity cost won't make a lot of difference. So many of these rigs are for spoiled kids that have no clue about power bills.

Re:And?

[operagost]

The think the more important note here is that the guy with a 707 HP Challenger Hellcat is probably not driving it to work every day. Even if he were, he's a vanishingly small portion of the vehicle fleet. The frustration of the greenies over SUVs when they were incredibly popular was well placed, but losing your shit over elite musclecars is straining out a gnat to swallow a camel.

Gaming systems are much the same. I'm more annoyed with the knuckleheads who purposely turn off their energy saving features like screen blanking.

Re:And?

[es330td]

that's a savings of $126.

I am pretty certain the person who spent thousands on a top end gaming rig does not particularly care about saving $126 over the course of three years.

Re:And?

[AmiMoJo]

Actually that is the one area where TFA might actually have a point. Due to new technologies from AMD and Nvidia that sync the monitor refresh timing to the GPU instead of the other way around, a slightly less powerful GPU can provide essentially the same performance as a more powerful one did under the old system.

Basically if your monitor has a fixed 60Hz refresh rate then the GPU must be able to supply every frame in under 16.6ms. Any drops will be immediately noticeable. With flexible frame rate the GPU can go down to say 55Hz for a few frames, or even down to 50Hz and the player won't notice. Motion will still look fluid.

Okay, some gamers want 120Hz now, but the principal still applies.

Re:And?

[UnknownSoldier]

> Good craftsmen don't keep crappy tools.

An expert craftsmen will demonstrate mastery using crappy tools just to prove that the quality of the tool is just an excuse / cop-out.

* Mona Lisa with MSPaint

Re: And?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure the Al Gore can be considered the average environmentalist.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I should swap out my video card to save a little power, drop a few frames and die a virtual death? I think they have their priorities backwards.

Building a gaming PC is like building a hotrod, if you're worrying about fuel efficiency you're doing it wrong.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

This certainly describes my "average" environmentalist friends. Set a few car fires and then head for the islands with the staff.

Re:And?

[Calydor]

I wonder if the energy savings from using the treadmill to power the computer make up for the energy spent heating the water for the shower you need after.

Re:And?

[boomer_rehfield]

>The think the more important note here is that the guy with a 707 HP Challenger Hellcat is probably not driving it to work every day.

That may be true mostly, but I have a few coworkers that have some wicked cars, one with a Hellcat, one with an Audi R8, and 'most' of them are daily drivers. I'm on the other end with a 2010 Jeep Rubicon, lifted with 35" tires. I get a whopping 11mpg and it's a daily driver because of my love for my jeep, and I'll keep her a very long time. I save money, electricity, water...I tear out walls to upgrade insulation.... but all bets are off when it comes to the Jeep or my gaming rig.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if lazy or facing time constraints. You can do a lot with very poor tools if you take time to do things properly. In the real world, people will find some compromise between time and quality, or find that time is worth the cost of better tools. But at the end of the day, the person saying it can't be done is likely just a person that doesn't know how to do it, while someone who is more skilled might say it can be done, but is not worth the effort.

Re:And?

[cfalcon]

Nailed it.
Also if you look at their graphs, there's nothing in there that is high power and efficient.

https://sites.google.com/site/...

Their efficiency metric- watts divided by fps- is a pretty odd spec (the unitless efficiency is output power over input power, so you'd at least expect a high efficiency number to mean something is more efficient, not less).

The bigger part is this: it shows that computers that use more power deliver more performance, and that there aren't really any exceptions to this. The top performer is the most power using guy. The bottom performer uses the least power. Trying to sort by "efficiency" is noble, but not helpful.

A gamer will buy the best machine he can afford. It would be interesting if, for a given level of performance, the site could pick out something that, while possibly costing more, would save you money over a year. Again, FOR A GIVEN LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE. The performance needs to be the benchmark, and the performance for a given dollar is also important- you might be willing to pay more upfront for something more efficient, if that was offered, but ONLY if it was as fast as the other options.

Additionally, a lot of gamers will assemble a box based on off the shelf components. Often, they will pick a much bigger power supply than needed, which decreases efficiency- but I do this and feel it to be totally and completely rational. Because the bigger power supplies are generally more reliable, that slight inefficiency is just a small insurance policy (and costs almost nothing). If you are picking an efficient and big power supply, you are probably already doing things correctly.

Parts of the site are noble- while the power supply comparison is helpful, you're probably going to look at efficiency when buying one anyway. Meanwhile, it's much harder to suss out 'efficiency' from CPUs- they mostly just use clock speed. In practice, you'll buy the best CPU you can afford, trading off between CPU and graphics card based on the types of games you play.

The meat of the comparison points is the graphics card. That's the crown jewel of any gaming PC. But is "watts per teraflops" going to really answer which one you should grab? Lets say you are in the market to spend 300-350 on a graphics card, and you are considering a GTX 970. That's a strong pick, can we get more efficient? Well, the GTX 980 is more efficient, but the metric changes from 33 watts per teraflop to 36.3 watts per teraflop. Ok, what does that translate to in dollars?

Well, the two in question are already pretty goddamned efficient by the standards of graphics cards, using 145 and 165 watts. The higher performing card even has the 145 watt signature! Ok, so that's 20 watts. Lets assume that this guy is on and running hard for 15 solid days out of a month, a ludicrous assumption. If you pay a high price of 20 cents per kwh, this is... a buck fifty of savings per month.

But the 970 costs like 350, and the 980 like 650. You'll never make that cost difference up in the lifetime of the product.

If you're building your own PC, this site is useful to help you pick out good quality components, which also seem to have a lot of efficiency and can push frames. That's nice, but I suspect that the difference between using this site and not is pretty small.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking to gamers about their systems being inefficient when it comes to power is akin to talking to the guy driving a supercharged Challenger about gas mileage.

Except that I know quite a few people into car modding and racing that complain about gas mileage and are willing to do something about it. Performance takes priority, but that doesn't mean mileage is forgotten about, at least for people who only have a single car they need to use as their daily drive. ECU mods that allow multiple profiles helped and were popular.

Re:And?

[infolation]

No, just play tetris.

Re:And?

[Drethon]

So, what you're saying is that dropping from 1000 frames per second, to 950 FPS is all it takes to die?

My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"

And a good workman doesn't use a screw driver to hammer nails.

Re:And?

[GuB-42]

Get a better power supply : better energy efficiency, cooler, less noisy, and more stable.
That's probably the best way to save power without sacrificing any performance. Ah, and around 500W is enough for all but the most demanding setups (multi-GPU...). So better look for a good power supply with a reasonable wattage, (see 80+ rating) rather than something overpowered that double as a space heater. Of course the noname crap that typically come with noname cases is to be avoided at all costs if you respect your hardware.

Re:And?

[JoeMerchant]

If mom wasn't paying the electricity bills, the energy savings after a year or so would also buy an updated GPU.

Re:And?

[spire3661]

This is a shit analogy that breaks down fast. Tools are an INCREDIBLY important part of what the finished product will end up being. You should stop using this as an argument.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't working out enough if you need a hot shower afterwards. I like a cold shower when I am sweating and overheated.

Re:And?

[Jamu]

I see you've not tried soldering with an under-powered soldering iron.

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

My dad had a saying, I think it applies here: "A poor workman blames his tools"

Ehh...yes and no. A workman generally isn't competing against others, which is why he has no excuse. Not so with gamers.

If two craftsman are up against each other in a woodworking competition, their tools absolutely matter. Give one a dull blade to work with instead of the sharp one the other guy has, and he'd have every reason to complain about his tools and how they're affecting his ability to produce results. After all, the fact that he is fully capable of producing absolutely amazing results using just that dull blade doesn't matter one bit in a competition setting, since what matters in a competition is his ability to produce better results than the person he is competing against.

So it is with much of gaming.

A "craftsman" of the gaming world may be more than capable of producing amazing results on an everyday basis by wiping the floor with their opponents, regardless of their tools, but put them up against someone of similarly-masterful skill and their tools can absolutely make a load of difference.

That said, I actually agree with your sentiment, since computers, latency, and other factors get overused as excuses when the bigger issue is merely the player's competency. I recall back when I played vanilla World of Warcraft, I was getting 0.5 frames per second (i.e. 1 frame every two seconds; that is not a typo) at minimum settings in some of the raids, simply because I was at the time running the game on a laptop that was well under the minimum specs (the bug tunnel in AQ40 was particularly bad for me). Yet, despite that, I'd consistently come in with the least "overheal" and the second highest healing among the members of the 40-man raid (i.e. I healed the second most and did so with better efficiency than anyone else). When the raid leaders got wind of how poor my computer was, they started calling the other healers to task over their performances, since if I was able to produce those sorts of results with such a crappy setup, the others had no excuse.

All of which is to say, bad gamers do indeed blame their tools inappropriately in the vast majority of cases, but gamers also have better and more valid reasons for blaming their tools than a typical craftsman.

Re:And?

[sosume]

I disagree with your maths. If the saving was 50/mo you'd break even in 6 months. The GTX 970 consumes 145 watt, the GTX 980 consumes 165 watt according to NVidia. In a total of 15 days of non stop full use, 360 hours, this translates to 52.2 kwh for the GTX 970 (USD 13.42, I pay usd 0.26/kwh) versus 59.4 kwh for the GTX 980 (USD 15.27). So the saving would be USD 1.85 per month, however if I'm not mistaken the GTX 980 is the better of the two so there is no 'saving' as such.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, woodworking is a bad example, as just about any dull tool can be sharpened by a craftsman who knows what they are doing, and there are arguments both way about tools that hold an edge for a long time vs. softer metal tools. And at actual competitions for woodworking, I've seen people who have a bazillion specialized saws, planes and chisels, and someone who has a small bag with maybe two of each, and you can't tell from that who will win. Usually their age will have a much stronger correlation.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

So funny. Wow, you even got the approval of fellow slashdotters. That PROVES you're funny.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say that you're one of those (probably the majority) that leaves their computer on 24/7.

Why do people still do this? If you have some background task that needs done 24/7 (and it isn't video encoding), then you should build/buy/steal a NAS.

Re:And?

[Coren22]

Um, I am guessing you haven't ever actually worked in electronics.

A 1200W power supply used to power a 500W system won't be a space heater, it will be more efficient and will last longer. The computer won't magically start pulling more power because the overhead is there, the power supply can deliver 1200W, not always delivers 1200W.

Buy a high efficiency power supply that is over the wattage requirements of your computer (all numbers that can be looked up). you get more from increased efficiency, not from less overhead in the power supply.

Your low wattage power supply working near its max wattage will actually put out more heat, die quicker, and be less efficient than a higher wattage supply.

Re:And?

[onkelonkel]

My $100 Ryobi tile saw wobbles just enough to slightly chip the edges of every cut. The $1200 Bosch tile saw I rented does not wobble at all, and makes absolutely perfect cuts. Craftsman or no craftsman, the better tool produces better results.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

" I was getting 0.5 frames per second (i.e. 1 frame every two seconds; that is not a typo) at minimum settings in some of the raids"

*cough* bullsh1t *cough*

Re:And?

[epyT-R]

No, actually it's more about keeping a high enough minimum framerate so that the game doesn't hitch, while having as much eye candy as possible. Benchmarks are done with vsync turned off to see comparative results of how much headroom is available, which is why you see comparisons done at high framerates. It is also done to reduce lagtime between screen and input updates, depending how the game in question renders. There are also those of us who aren't blind and can see a noticeable difference between 16 and 8ms frames and build accordingly. This is why you see bitching when a game is framerate capped. There's a much larger contingent who wants high resolution over framerate, and as benches show, even 3 of the best gpus can't guarantee 16ms frames at those resolutions.

Gaming machines draw more than the $1500 laptop, but they can also do a lot more, too. They also do a great job doubling as workstations for those of us who can't afford $5000 cpus and overpriced 'workstation' class hardware. The gaming box, especially with judicious overclocking, fills the middle ground between data entry secretary boxes and $10k autodesk workstations, making high performance accessible to those with relatively limited funds.

Your analogy is shit. Yes, a good player can play on a shit system and score, but he'll do far better on a modern system and have a much better time doing so. Of course, the type of game, its engine, and its assets, matter greatly as well.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

"or facing time constraints"

Gee, I wonder how this applies to video games....

Re:And?

[Shadow of Eternity]

That's basically the same logic as the Just World Fallacy. If you give someone a spoon and expect them to dig like they've got a backhoe they're not a poor craftsman, they've just got really shitty tools handicapping their ability to work.

Re:And?

[Shadow of Eternity]

It's not an analogy to them, it's a way of justifying their broken thinking. It's like the bastard child of the bootstrap and just world fallacies, to them any response they don't like is an "excuse".

Re:And?

[dcw3]

My 470hp SRT8 Charger isn't quite a Hellcat, but it's all they had back in '12, when it replaced my '03 Infiniti FX45. And yes, it is my daily driver...why not? Oh, and it's getting a couple mpg more than the Infiniti, unless I put my foot down hard.

Re:And?

[Anguirel]

I don't understand your concluding points.

Assume two power supplies with identical efficiency measures (say, 95+). One is intended for a maximum output of 600 Watts, the other for a maximum output of 1200 Watts. I'm drawing 500 Watts. Shouldn't they have nearly identical amounts of total heat output and efficiency? I'm not sure about the "die quicker" part as well, but that's a separate piece.

Now assume I have a fixed budget, and can get one of 2 PSUs that fit my budget: Option 1 is a 1200 Watt unit that's below the 75+ rating, and Option 2 is a 600 Watt unit with a 95+ rating. From my understanding, as long as I'm drawing under that 600 Watts, the lower wattage PSU should be more efficient. That's the whole point of the rating. Are you saying that simply because it has more overhead, the higher wattage PSU will be significantly more efficient for some reason at lower outputs?

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The good craftsman might be able to do good work by taking that cheap tile saw and replacing the bearings and doing whatever else is needed to remove the wobble.

By fixing whatever is deficient about the crappy tool, he is not "keeping crappy tools", rather he's keeping improvised fine tools, so my point still stands:

A good craftsman does not keep crappy tools.

Replacing, improving or discarding all fit the qualification of "not keep".

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

I can't prove my statement, since I don't think I kept any of the old screenshots I had that showed me at 0.5 fps, but I did manage to scrounge up this old one still floating around on my Photobucket account from back then. In the menubar at the bottom, you can see that it says 4 fps, and that's with only one other character moving, no enemies on the screen, and no spells going off (we had just had a ridiculous wipe on one of the pulls leading up to C'thun in AQ40). Essentially nothing at all happening on the screen, and yet I was getting 4 fps just to render 40 characters lying dead at minimum settings. Yeah. Call BS if you want, but you'll be wrong.

In the bug tunnel, once you had 40 people running together with dozens of bugs chasing us and everyone casting AoEs with each AoE causing an additional animation every time it hit one of those dozens of enemies...to say the least, 0.5 fps was a regular occurrence for me. During actual boss fights in AQ40, I'd be getting more like 1-3 fps, depending on the fight and whether or not I could safely aim my view at the floor without needing to worry about my surroundings. I'd get slightly higher framerates in MC and BWL, given that the environments weren't quite as large as in AQ40, but I was basically always just playing healer whack-a-mole with the HP bars while staring at the ground or a wall (which made fights like Baron and Vael VERY interesting for me), but I loved raiding and I wasn't holding my guild back, so I kept doing it, despite being at less than single digit fps at times. I stopped raiding in The Burning Crusade until I got a new computer, since a lot of those fights called for more movement than I could manage with my framerate, which meant that I no longer felt like I wasn't holding my guild back.

Re:And?

[Anubis IV]

Following up, here's another image showing me getting 12fps out in the open world with nothing going on. That was about the best that I could ever hope for when using that ancient computer, since it was an 800MHz Titanium PowerBook G4, and the Mac version of WoW had not been optimized very well back when vanilla was fresh. Sometime during TBC the performance of the Mac version picked up dramatically, and there were other cross-platform optimizations that they did as well which further improved the performance.

For instance, it used to be a regular thing for me to have to leap out of the zeppelin to my death and then recover my body if I simply wanted to travel between the continents, because I wouldn't finish with the loading screen I got when switching instances/zones until after the zeppelin had already left the tower at my destination. There were even times when I wouldn't finish the first loading screen before the return flight loading screen had started, resulting in me arriving back at my departure point after having stared at loading screens for about 5 minutes. Turns out, it was happening because Blizzard had done a poor job at optimizing the loading of addons. The really scary thing was that I had actually done a lot of optimizing and scrapping of unused functionality in the addons I was using just to get my addons to load even THAT fast. After Blizzard fixed it, I went from 1-2 minute loading screens on that ancient computer, down to 10-20 second loading screens.

So yeah, that computer sucked.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

It amuses me when people get their shit in a knot over an SUV that's driven 20 miles a week, and then drive their Prius 45 miles round trip every day.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad used to tell me that too, Then he refinished his house with Chinese drywall.
Now his favorite saying is "puck those pinko commie bastards, I hope Hillary gets elected and borrows even more money than that asshole Obama did, This whole country is going down the tubes! And if you think your going to pay for it by taking my social security, it'll be over my dead body!"
And I say, Relax dad, Hillary's not going to get elected.
And he says, Yeah that's what you said about Obama! Then he starts telling me stories about Calvin Coolidge.

Re:And?

[pepty]

An expert craftsman might demonstrate mastery using crappy tools - by choosing a project that hides the inaccuracies caused by using crappy tools. Then they will go back to using the best tools they have because time is fucking money.

Re:And?

[pepty]

Woodworking is a perfect example: pick a cabinetry project that requires perfectly square edges, exact lengths, and absolutely perfect joints with no gaps. A great craftsman could eventually get the job done with crap tools. But in the same amount of time he could have made three (and a profit!) using good ones.

Re:And?

[pepty]

And the rest are for adults that have no time to actually play games, so they are hibernating 23/7 and not really burning any electricity to speak of.

Re:And?

[rioki]

Actually that analogy holds up quite well, just they ignore the corollary. A good craftsman does not blame his tools, since he knows that the tool selection process is part of the job. A good craftsman will not even start a job with a crappy tool.

Re: And?

[Anonymous Coward]

...in this case the tool -can- be to blame. I played Warface on my old PC, and was almost always in the negatives for kill/death ratio. Upgrade my machine, and suddenly I'm showing much more competent results. The funny part is, for smoothness of gameplay I notice no difference between the two...but my shots are registering a LOT more than they were because I'm not lagging behind everyone else graphically.

Re:And?

[Archangel Michael]

Give a craftsman a tile saw, and the work will be better than an apprentices work, regardless of which of the two both are using. The poor workman will blame the tool, the craftsman will likely tell you the cheap saw produces cheap results. But it will still look better than the apprentice's work.

Re:And?

[Archangel Michael]

I've seen a guy use a hammer on screws going into a wood deck. It was freaking awesome to watch.

Re:And?

[onkelonkel]

You missed the point. The best craftsman in the world can't make a clean cut with the $100 saw. The apprentice will have no trouble making clean cuts with the $1200 saw.

Re:And?

[toddestan]

The good craftsmen will likely do things so that the bad cuts won't be visible on the finished project as much as possible, should he/she be forced to use a $100 tile saw.

But really, the good craftsmen is not going to blame his tools because they are his tools and he carefully picked them out. One of things that makes him a good craftsmen is that he knows what tools to use for the job and what to avoid. The apprentice may not have that experience, and won't get the same results.

Ugh, the upgrade treadmill rears its ugly head

[Anonymous Coward]

At least this time the upgrade argument is phrased as "it pays for itself!" instead of "it has bigger numbers!"

The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a gaming PC and I play games to enjoy myself not to save the planet.

Does anyone drive a sports care in order to save the planet?

Does anyone worry about he carbon foot print of the roller-coaster they are riding at a theme park?

This story is just silly.

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real consequence should be that games should not only run on a high-end I7-System but also on I3 and others.

I wanted to play the new Wolfenstein, but it required an I7, which I don't have. So I didn't buy it...

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

No games require an i7. Not even wolfenstein, which runs fine on both my 4690K and 4790K pcs.

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is this perception that "Gamers" are selfish, self-absorbed, and immature...

It's twoo! It's twoo!

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

The recommended spec is an nVidia GeForce GTX 660 with an i7, but I doubt there'd be any significant difference between that and an GTX 660 with an i5.

Re:The consumption is the point.

[__aaclcg7560]

The i7 is in the recommended hardware specs, not in the minimum hardware specs, for "Wolfenstein: The New Order." The range between minimum and recommended is pretty broad. More hardware is always better but not always required to enjoy the game.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/requirements/wolfenstein-the-new-order/12119/

Re:The consumption is the point.

[bev_tech_rob]

No games require an i7. Not even wolfenstein, which runs fine on both my 4690K and 4790K pcs.

Ummmm....the 4790K IS a Core I7. So obviously you wouldn't have any problems running it.....

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

No games require an i7. Not even wolfenstein, which runs fine on both my 4690K and 4790K pcs.

Ummmm....the 4790K IS a Core I7. So obviously you wouldn't have any problems running it.....

The point is it runs fine on the i5 too. Why does this require an explicit explanation?

Re:The consumption is the point.

[Darinbob]

Makes no sense. You can make sports cars that are more efficient. And besides, those people with the expensive polluting sports cars are considered assholes by most of the world, I don't see why anyone would want to compared with them.

Gaming PCs are very wasteful and usually for the reason that no one has even once bothered to care about efficiency. They started selling kilowatt power supplies and the gamers said "hey, I want one of those!" They could get the same performance with a more efficient computer. It would cost more though, which is actually a selling point since many of these gamers brag about how much they spent.

Millis started the site http://hardware.slashdot..

[CaptainStumpy]

Do you even try to check your work??
FIX THE LINK

Fuck Off

[Tokolosh]

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken

Re:Fuck Off

[lesincompetent]

If only i had mod points today! In a positive way of course.

Re:Fuck Off

[AmiMoJo]

What a strange attitude. If you could save money on electricity by simply buying more efficient components for the same price as inefficient ones, and by enabling some power saving options on your PC for free and all with no loss of performance, wouldn't it make sense to do so?

It's like pointing out that there is no point accelerating and braking hard in heavy traffic. You won't get there any quicker, you just waste money that you could spend on other stuff.

This instant angry reaction to anything involving energy saving is bizarre and makes no rational sense.

Re:Fuck Off

[Tokolosh]

What you say is so obvious to any rational person, that to be lectured on the subject is annoying.

And what is the sense in buying $500 of components to save $100 in electricity? My numbers may be wrong, but simplistic imperatives are stupid.

Re:Fuck Off

[Anonymous Coward]

If it takes me time to research, time to order, and time to install or replace components, I already don't care. My gaming time is already limited and valuable, I don't give it up easily.

Re:Fuck Off

[Anonymous Coward]

My numbers may be wrong, but simplistic imperatives are stupid.

So are simplistic complaints. If I'm buying 500 dollars worth of computer components, they usually have a purpose of their own, saving power would only be part of it.

The only thing that comes close to a 500 dollar expenditure on saving energy is when I bought some insulation and window film. But then, that'll last 10 or 20 more years, so it'll pay off quite a bit.

And for what it's worth, my electric company regularly includes messages and notes on simple ways to save power and thus money, on its bills. Getting annoyed by that is silly, and having yet another article on it? Hardly intrusive.

Let me know when he comes to your home to yell at you.

Re:Fuck Off

[JoeMerchant]

Think about V twin motorcycle engines and all that they represent in our culture...

Not everybody wants to fit in, be efficient, save money, or listen to what anybody else thinks.

Re:Fuck Off

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like those people who say no one should own an SUV or pickup truck.

Then you buy a house in Seattle and your garage is only accessible via an unpaved, somewhat steep back alley. Suddenly, ground clearance becomes a concern.

Re:Fuck Off

[Darinbob]

Because $100 of electricity is worth more than $100. If you render everything as a dollar value then nothing will have real value anymore. How much are the kids worth, how much to charge for an evening watching the sunset, how much to charge to improve the environment?

Re:Fuck Off

[Coren22]

I had one person on here tell me I should go out and buy a more efficient car to go along with my pickup as it is so inefficient. I think they failed logic class.

My pickup gets 15.4 miles to the gallon, I go through a tank (~25 gal) a week, spending between $60 and $80 (at the peak of the oil prices). So, my truck costs me max of $400 a month to run, and I am supposed to go out and buy an efficient car to save money/gas/the environment? Even if the car uses $0 of fuel/electricity, a car isn't going to cost that little for the loan/insurance. I suppose I could buy used, but even then, how much car could you get for $400 a month?

   

Re:Fuck Off

[Anonymous Coward]

Because $100 of electricity is worth more than $100.

Then they should charge more for it, in taxes, fees or bloody death match for the right to live on the grid.

If you render everything as a dollar value then nothing will have real value anymore.

Everything will have a value in dollars if one assigns it, not nothing.

How much are the kids worth, how much to charge for an evening watching the sunset, how much to charge to improve the environment?

Those are NPV calculations. My kids are worth a lot to me, yours... not so much. That why I pay for mine to go to college and vote to cut funding for yours to go. Not really, I don't have kids, but the point stands.

An evening, watching the sunset is about $60 here. That's the price difference for two, excluding alcohol, between the restaurant with a view of the sunset and the one with a view of the restaurant that has the good view. See also the hotel price variance between ocean view, ocean front and "garden" view.

The worth of improving the local environment "here" is about equal to the cost of moving to a nicer place. If it was more, we'd all move if we could. If less, the nice neighborhood people would move "here".

It's harsh, but pretty easy to evaluate. It doesn't matter if I'm enlightened or not, the thug with a gun or a club will take my stuff if I'm a pacifist, break my irrigation system and move to the next sucker if no one stops them. Whether the US is the pacifist or the thug in the analogy I'll leave to other ACs to troll with.

Re:Fuck Off

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I would say get a more fuel efficient car, get rid of the truck and with the savings, that one time per year that you'd need a truck, just pay the delivery charge, you'll save money over all. And for fucks sake, get out of the fast lane, you're driving 20 under the posted limit. Also, I know you think you can, but you really do lack the brain power to operate a cell phone and drive at the same time. I know this because I'm on my bike and you just about killed me half a mile back because you weren't paying attention.

How do I know all this applies to you, because I assume you are one of the 99% of big fucking truck owners. Can't drive for shit, and never use it to haul anything.

Re:Fuck Off

[Coren22]

Except that I have a valid need for the truck, which is why I bought it.

I am the tow car for my kid's Boy Scout troop, I tow one of the trailers, and we take at least one trailer on every camp out. Would you like me to tow these 5000 lb trailers with a Prius, or should I be renting a truck at $80 a day for the 1 weekend a month, and most weekends in the summer (for personal camping)? I'm also looking at a boat, which you really shouldn't tow with even a SUV, but I have seen people do it. Just because the econobox works for you, doesn't mean everyone will be just fine with one.

Multitask

[sociocapitalist]

How many beers can I fit inside the case?

Re:Multitask

[bobbied]

Depends on if you leave the beer in the cans or not...

Re:Multitask

[Smidge204]

One, maybe two, if you leave it in the container.

You can likely fit over a hundred beers in there if you take it out of the containers first, though that may require judicial use of caulking first.
=Smidge=

Re:Multitask

[Coren22]

It depends, are you using the beer for the cooling fluid in your liquid cooling system?

Re:Multitask

[sociocapitalist]

:-)

Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

Wouldn't it be easier to TURN OFF the gaming computer when you're not using it?

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

My gaming computer turns itself off when I'm not using it. It even turns parts of itself off, that I'm not using, when it's on.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Sandbox-Six-Actual]

Although its worth noting that the power shock on a hard start can cause fatigue in soldered joints over time, potentially having a theoretical effect on component lifetime.

Many modern operating systems combined with the powerful components in a modern "gaming" PC can achieve recovery from cold boot OR from a deep sleep state very quickly.

Strongly suggested to use a UPS if you anticipate using sleep often but dont have a very stable local power grid, as sleep during an S1 or S3 sleep state can cause loss of system context, forcing a return from S0 (basically like a cold boot).

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[WillgasM]

Sometimes my gaming PC turns itself off WHILE I'm using it...damn PSU.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[bobbied]

Wouldn't it be easier to TURN OFF the gaming computer when you're not using it?

Sure would.. How's this? Buy a board game and have fun that way.... Actually interacting with REAL people in real life might be a refreshing change of pace.. Besides, your mom would love the idea of you having friends over...

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[kesuki]

even with all solid capacitors running a machine 24/7 will cause the caps to pop in just 8-10 years (average) instead of 40 years (if run 8 hrs a day) the theoretical problem of soldier point failures is like saying 'oh i never shut off my car because it has to be the right climate and i never know when i will want to use it, plus the strain on the electronics and climate control from a cold start'

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

EE here, turning on and off electronics has no impact whatsoever on solder joints. Unstable AC can have an impact but it has to be really bad or you have a very cheap PSU. Turning off your PC (gaming or not) when not in use actually saves wear and tear on all components. Heat is the #1 enemy of electronics.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

A computer is never OFF unless the hardware power switch is turned off or unplugged from the wall. Something is always on to wait for some kind of input from the keyboard, mouse or network. I cut my monthly electric bill in half by putting my TV and all-related devices on a power strip to turn everything off.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

My mother kicked me out the door and let me run around the neighborhood with all the other kids. That was in the 1970's. Today it would be child abuse if kids were away from the TV and allowed outside to play.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[The-Ixian]

This is exactly what I do. I only have the computer on when I am using it.

The paper is vague on this point, but it seems to imply that the computer is running all the time.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[eth1]

Wouldn't it be easier to TURN OFF the gaming computer when you're not using it?

Turning my PC off at night would save me *maybe* $40-$50 per year over running it 24/7. The cost of higher component failure rates due to thermal cycling (vs. heating up and staying that way) would probably end up costing me more than that (I try to keep a PC for 4-5 years).

One tip for efficiency that I think a lot of people miss is properly sizing the power supply. They run most efficiently when you're around 50% or so of max load, and terrible efficiency under 20% load. People with the "bigger is better" mindset using 200W of a 1200W PSU will be wasting a lot of power vs. properly sizing the supply at 400-500W.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[operagost]

Half? I kinda think it was only a small subset of your devices that was actually using all the power. My cable box has a DVR, so it basically uses almost as much power when "off" as when on. Smart TVs and blu-ray players might keep their CPUs booted up so that you don't have to wait every time you turn them on. Then we have some defective cell phone chargers that use power even when nothing is plugged into them. That's why I got a Kill-a-watt. I'd rather not unplug everything in my house.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[xenotransplant]

Kicking a child is considered abuse, yes. Playing outside, probably not. I am reasonably certain that locking children in-doors and forcing them to watch TV would be considered abuse.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

I'm still using an old CRT TV. I used to have the TV turned on all the time as background noise. After I put the TV and everything connected to it on the power strip, I discovered that I only watch TV for three or four hours per week. Hence, my monthly electric bill got cut in half.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[xenotransplant]

Your solder joints fail because they were flowed by a 4 year old chinese kid, not because you power cycle.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

Modern society disagrees with you.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/tammy-cooper-texas-mom-arrested-kids-unsupervised-video_n_1900113.html

http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/local/2015/01/15/parents-charged-with-neglect-for-kids-playing-outside/21821723/

http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/29/mom-charged-with-felony-for-letting-son-walk-to-park-alone-video/

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/free-range-parents-found-responsible-child-neglect-allowing/story?id=29363859

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

I turn off my gaming PC and it's still running fine after seven years. My FreeNAS file server stays on 24/7 and I just replaced five five-year-old hard drives because one failed outright, another had bad sectors, and the rest were tripping the SMART sensor for overheating. The newer Western Digital Red NAS hard drives run cooler and are more energy efficient than the old Seagate hard drives.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[oic0]

Dont even need to. ALL of the components have power scaming features. That 600 watt gaming pc uses less power than its monitor when youre browsing the web (50-75 watts). People seem to not understand that the power ratings are maximums, not constant.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[cfalcon]

But not if their PC ramps up to wanting 600W during gaming, right?

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[war4peace]

My computer is being used even when I'm not using it myself. I have an FTP server, a small webserver, a database, a TeamSpeak server and a PLEX Media Server on it. While idling (aka "not gaming on it") it consumes around 200W of power. I balanced that consumption by replacing all my light bulbs with low-consumption ones, and I actually pay less than when I had incandescent light bulbs and no gaming PC.
While gaming, my PC consumes 400-450W and that happens 2-3 hours a day, some days it consumes less while gaming because some games I play don't tax the CPU/GPU so much. GPU Power is at 30% while playing Kerbal Space Program but it jumps to 100% while playing Witcher 3.

TFA is blanket-statement and scaremongering. If you really want a reduction in power consumption, tell all those bloody corporations to cut off the amount of lighting they use for their buildings, most of which are lit like a fucking Christmas tree and filled to the brim with computers which never turn off (not talking about servers here).

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Dinghy]

I'm still using an old CRT TV. I used to have the TV turned on all the time as background noise. After I put the TV and everything connected to it on the power strip, I discovered that I only watch TV for three or four hours per week. Hence, my monthly electric bill got cut in half.

So the core of cutting your electric bill in half wasn't from using a power strip to eliminate power use from electronics while they are in standby, but instead was from turning things off when they weren't in use. I laud your cut in consumption but I think you are attributing it to the wrong change.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

You're overlooking the fact that since EVERYTHING WAS OFF on the power strip that nothing was in standby mode to sip power.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[__aaclcg7560]

No one hand solders consumer electronics when a machine can wave solder a board at a faster rate than a human.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[JoeMerchant]

Tell that to my kids - I turn off the (abandoned, lost interest hours ago) PS3 about 4 times a week.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[spire3661]

200w at idle? What the hell are you running? You really should think about offloading those services to a micro-server.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Blaskowicz]

I would say the peak is at about 60% - or amusingly, close to one divided by the golden number.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[nosociallife]

When I was 10 years old I had a little 1980 Yamaha 50CC dirt bike that I would ride around by myself, we would play Ninja by jumping off roofs and tight rope walk on barbed wire fences. I'd go for 3+ mile long bike rides to friends houses while my parents were still at work. The only safety gear I ever owned was a helmet for the Yamaha.

Now I have 2 young kids and I can't let them play in the yard alone. Not that they are in any danger, but I do not want to get arrested for allowing my kids to be kids. I have a neighbor down the street who has already come over to talk to us about the "danger" of not supervising them. I have no doubt they would call the police in an instant for not listening to their fear culture advice.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[war4peace]

I'm measuring my PC and everything else on my desk, e.g. external HDDs, battery charger, docked phone, charging tablet, headphones, desk lamp, two monitors, the GPON and so on.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Coren22]

So, the stresses from thermal expansion are nothing?

Going from room temperature to running temperature is what causes the fatigue, and in fact was an issue with nVidia cards at one point. Power cycling does cause component fatigue, just not often enough to care about unless you have a component that didn't take it into account in the design, or used the wrong material in construction.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Coren22]

FYI, I have a TS3 server as well, but I run mine in EWS. It costs me about $6 a month to run. You might want to consider it.

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[Coren22]

Wow...that was terrible.

Amazon EC2.

I mixed up AWS and EC2...

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[war4peace]

It's not that important to pay cash for it :)

Re:Here's an obvious power saving solution...

[antdude]

But some of us use it 24/7. ;)

If you read the article

[MasseKid]

If you read or even browse the paper, all he really says is if you use newer components, they are more energy efficient. Which is like well, pretty much everything else on the damn planet.

Re:If you read the article

[0123456]

So I should scrap my old card every couple of years and replace it, even though the card costs more than any power saving I could possibly gain.

Totally makes sense in Greenie World, I guess. Just not in this one.

Re:If you read the article

[bobbied]

If you read or even browse the paper, all he really says is if you use newer components, they are more energy efficient. Which is like well, pretty much everything else on the damn planet.

I wonder... Do they take into account the resources necessary to BUILD these new components and scrap the old ones?

I read once that it's more environmentally friendly to keep using an old building, car, etc over having to scrap the old one and build a new one...

Re:If you read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were a gamer, you'd do that anyway.

Re:If you read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read or even browse the paper, all he really says is if you use newer components, they are more energy efficient. Which is like well, pretty much everything else on the damn planet.

I wonder... Do they take into account the resources necessary to BUILD these new components and scrap the old ones?

I read once that it's more environmentally friendly to keep using an old building, car, etc over having to scrap the old one and build a new one...

It's "greener" for me to live in my old house and improve it's energy efficiency than to have a totally new house built from the ground up. Quite a bit cheaper too, even more so when accounting for being closer to the city center because I live in an old established neighborhood rather than another new development in the middle of nowhere.

Re:If you read the article

[Anonymous Coward]

So I should go buy a $500 video card to gain $50 per year in power savings?

Power saving settings are annoying

[mikethe1337]

Power saving settings on computers are super annoying. I work for a company whose software is ran in the cloud and the dang power saving settings on network cards make our program freeze in about 2 minutes of inactivity to save power annoying as heck to walk non-technical people through changing their windows power settings.

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[lesincompetent]

Mod parent up. There's a time and a place for energy saving and sometimes it's NEVER.

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[The-Ixian]

Mod parent up. There's a time and a place for energy saving and sometimes it's NEVER.

Well, energy savings as implemented currently anyway.

I would argue that there is always a place for energy savings. It just may not be something an end user can implement but it could be designed into the system.

Power save settings can be annoying on some computers, but that doesn't mean it is impossible to design an energy efficient computer that functions well.

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

obviously shit software design.

if you did it right, it wouldn't do that...

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

We *have* energy efficient computers that function well. They are called computers.

Power saving mechanisms can be hella annoying, and it's very instructive to notice where they are used. At my workplace, all our customer delivered boxes- which have to do a goddamned job- don't have any of that crap. Meanwhile, our PCs that we use for email / spreadsheets / The Windows Experience are constantly turning pieces of themselves off for efficiency. It's clear that the model is, "if WE can save a buck at the low cost of fucking our employees, FULL SPEED AHEAD, but since the customers could sue us if shit fucks up, take the effective route there".

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[spire3661]

I curse Energy Star all the time. Monitors should not turn off after 3 seconds of no signal. I fight with EVERY linux install because X.org thinks terminals should always blank. Its maddening.

Re:Power saving settings are annoying

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo.... Turn off or adjust the power saving settings?

Will solve itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from the GPU and CPU, which these days down-clock themselves automatically anyway to save energy and reduce noise, modern gaming rigs are just the same as any other PC. If anything, they are more likely to sport SSD drives than HDD and variable speed fans as well.

From a quick scan of the PDF, it looks like the initiative is concerned with "vintage" gaming rigs that don't necessarily feature what I just said. So it seems that it's a problem that will "solve itself" as time passes. We just need even more demanding games to push the need to upgrade!

Newer hardware is more power efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Newer hardware is almost always more power efficient. The question is whether or not I have $1000 laying around to buy new equipment. That money is way more than I spend on electricity to run my inefficient old stuff.

This is no different than saying "we could save x brazillion gas/dollars/whatever if everyone would simply just buy a new electric vehicle. Don't worry, you can get almost the same performance if you choose carefully. Like a nice Telsa." Yeah...

Re:Millis started the site http://hardware.slashdo

[wonkey_monkey]

I blame Firefox et al for dropping the protocol from the address bar.

Do you suppose

[JazzHarper]

that a Fender Twin Reverb might be rather inefficient, too?

Re:Do you suppose

[frank_adrian314159]

But the Twin has always been an amp that real men used to keep warm in winter. It's dual use means that it's really the world's best sounding space heater. I think the reverb coils are used as auxiliary heating elements.

Re:Do you suppose

[TechyImmigrant]

that a Fender Twin Reverb might be rather inefficient, too?

I upgraded to the more efficient Mesa Mark V 25.
With all the energy I'm saving, I should be rich.

Six and a half ways to fail.

[Sandbox-Six-Actual]

1) Don't care. Seriously. I pay for the power, if it gets more expensive, I pay for more units of electricity.
2) I don't go and blow a couple grand on PC components to have to worry about S3, S6 and other sleep states effect when recovering a power rig.
3) A great way to start the conversation is calling people's gaming computers "the beast" and suggesting someone should "green" anything. (/sarcasm)
4) greening the beast only works with no preceding subdomain (like www.) www.greeningthebeast.org fails
5) A google site? Seriously? Welcome to geocities in 2015.
6) Did this site publish a "market survey"? Really? Its a massive spreadsheet that is pretty much unexplained and someone expects gamers to make use of this? I've got experience in statistics and finance from my day job and some of this thing is still hieroglyphics to me.
6.5) Did I mention, I don't care about greening when it comes to my gaming rig? I think I did.

Re:Six and a half ways to fail.

[cfalcon]

1)- Right, but you WOULD be interested in the same power at higher initial cost, as long as it made that cost up later in efficiency, right? I don't think there's much of that being pointed out by the site, but you'd consider spending an extra 300 bucks initially if it was saving you 15 bucks a month, right?
2)- Sleep states can go to hell. No reason to risk anything by using them in general.
3)- Disagree. Gaming machines are often quite beastly. It's partially a compliment.

I'm interested in the following things when building a gaming PC:

1- Component lifespan. I want pieces that won't break. I once bought a top of the line card that started having issues a couple months in. Burned me pretty hard.
2- Power. I want a machine that impresses me and anyone who sees it while it is new.
3- Heat dispersion. I hate any machine that cuts corners to try to pretend that heat isn't an issue. Heat will destroy my machine, and before that, my framerate.

Efficiency is mostly a part of (3) for me. I'd consider it to some degree, but it's a tertiary consideration.

Move along

[Anonymous Coward]

They go by nameplate component watt requirements, installed PSU, and watt per GHz instead of performance

Payback time

[gQuigs]

I used the newer video cards power improvements as one of the reasons to replace an older card*. The other reason for the upgrade was so I could play more of the new games coming out on Linux. I didn't factor in that I would spend more time gaming though...

*Replaced a Radeon HD 3870 for an Geforce 750 Ti.

bitcoin miners

[crtreece]

Hopefully this guy doesn't find out how much power is being used for bitcoin mining.

Re:bitcoin miners

[cfalcon]

That's less interesting to him, I'm sure- Bitcoin miners already care deeply about efficiency, because it hits their bottom line.

Re:bitcoin miners

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if they aren't already stealing power from their neighbors, or roommate splitting the electricity bill 50/50.

Re:bitcoin miners

[munch117]

If bitcoin miners really cared about energy efficiency, they would stop playing the zero-sum game of bitcoin mining. They only care about relative efficiency, compared to other miners.

Re: bitcoin miners

[Anonymous Coward]

Making mining more efficient means more buttcoin in their pocket. That means they care about efficiency.

Ok, I've just skimmed the article and...

[RogueyWon]

How is it possible to take 20 pages to say so little that is actually meaningful? It basically boils down to "newer and/or lower performance components draw less power". No shit, Sherlock.

It's also rather misinformed when it comes to the availability of power-consumption information for gaming PC components. My current PC is a self-built gaming PC and I can assure you that when I was putting it together, power consumption information was absolutely something I looked at, because it affected my choice of PSU. And if you go to the manufacturers' websites, power consumption information is usually available upfront. If it's not, or if you want to know how it varies depending on loads, then there are any number of testing, benchmarking and review sites just a google search away.

There is probably an interesting article that could be written about minimising power consumption in a gaming PC, but it's not this one. In reality, power consumption is one aspect of a sensitive series of trade-offs. On graphics cards, for instance, you get get the same brute-force performance from AMD cards as you can from Nvidia cards at (usually) a much lower price - but the trade-off comes in heat and power consumption. So you can base your decision on a balance between how much you care about the up-front purchase costs of the card, vs ongoing power costs, potentially the cost of a new PSU and the noise/discomfort factor of having something that burns with the heat of a billion fiery suns in your PC. Most people building gaming PCs are not blind to this stuff.

The article reads like a lightweight piece of political advocacy for more regulation, trying to solve a problem which increasingly doesn't exist (the general trend over time is towards more power-efficient components and electricity prices act as a further restraint). So the author can, to be blunt, fuck right off.

Re:Ok, I've just skimmed the article and...

[LWATCDR]

It also overlooks the fact that high end CPUs and GPUs all have power scaling. Your i7 and three overclocked GTX980s are not pulling anything like max power when you are posting on slashdot or watching netflix.

Re:Ok, I've just skimmed the article and...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the author is clearly trying to drum up support and has a silly science paper about this MAJOR USAGE OF ELECTRICITY

I have a better idea

[argStyopa]

How about we charge people according to the electricity they use?

That way, people can weigh what's important to them. If I want to work an extra little bit each day so I can make more money to spend on things like electricity for my gaming computer, I can.

I have this friend, Adam Smith, who I believe has explained it all pretty thoroughly. It's not a perfect system, by any means, but it's better than most, and pretty practical.

Re:I have a better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great, and I would agree, except for the fact that your wastefulness will cause many to starve and freeze to death when we ran out of useable fuel 50x faster than we could have if we used and rationed it a little bit more intelligently than, "It's mine! I'll do what I want with it because I am here now and I have money now!"

Re:I have a better idea

[argStyopa]

Oh histrionic bullshit.
We will NEVER run out of usable fuel. People have been saying "peak oil" since 1920. We have hundreds of years of natural gas, and CENTURIES of coal. After that, there's always nuclear, and hey, maybe solar and wind power will finally be profitable without subsidies.
At *worst*, what will happen is that electricity increases in price.

And as far as allocation of finite resources, I'd like to hear your idea that is better than simple capitalism? You might want to read Thomas Sowell's comments on beachfront property, and how they're allocated.

My Box

[Sam36]

The box I built in 2008 uses about 170 watts at idle with 4 core amd phenomII and nvidia 9800GT. I don't game anymore so my wife just leaves it on all day to use to browse facebook :|

Re:My Box

[Blaskowicz]

Undervolting would be worth it and even downgrading GPU or CPU. If you could trade your Phenom for an Athlon II X2 and the 9800GT for a 5450 or other that would be better.

like three refrigerators

[paulpach]

your average gaming computer is like three refrigerators.

I did not know that, that is awesome! I got some serious grocery shopping to do...

If only his hands were closer together......goatse

[ChoGGi]

and a choice quote FTA
"One problem the authors found was an immense variation in the nameplate power; for example, graphics processors ranged from 60 to 500 watts."

where can I find me one of these 500W GPUs?

You heard the man

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Everyone quick, "upgrade" your gaming rig to a quad-core intel Atom with built-in GPU!

Better power supplies

[Firethorn]

I am pretty certain the person who spent thousands on a top end gaming rig does not particularly care about saving $126 over the course of three years.

But point out that besides saving him electricity, that the better power supply is less likely to fail and will scream less, and he's interested again.

A gold rated E80+ power supply is less likely to quit.

Re:Better power supplies

[Shadow99_1]

Ironically I just had my Seasonic 80+ gold rated power supply die... While a bunch of PSUs I have in older systems before 80+ was a thing are still running just fine. It was effectively silent, but then GPU and CPU fans have always been louder than PSU fans in all the systems I've built since dedicated graphics cards with 3D became a thing.

Now the reason I bought it at the time was that it had some of the tightest power to the correct ratings for it's rails compared to other brands in testing. And from what my MB reported this was true with highly accurate power to the rails that never really fluctuated. But arguing that as a selling point for most people is probably kinda hard.

Re:Better power supplies

[Firethorn]

I have a Seasonic in my current machine that's pushing 8 years now, and it's still going strong. Like I said, 'less likely'.

You can't hold the lack of certification against power supplies from before the certification program began. If they've lasted this long they're probably from a reputable company in the first place.

My main thought today is that it's mostly the 'Yumcha' and bargain-price supplies that aren't going to have the certification today, indicating inferior parts.

As you say, the Seasonic has relatively tight controls on it's rails. Remember, we're not talking about average computer users here, but gamers, the principle reason to overclock and all that jazz. Ergo, they're more likely to be interested in voltage and stuff.

In other news...

[GameboyRMH]

Racing drivers can achieve energy savings of more than 75% by swapping out some components and driving more slowly around the track. This will improve reliability and efficiency!

Assumes Heat is a Waste Product

[Punko]

Where I live, three months of the year we need our central air conditioning. The remainder of the year we either need a small amount of heating, or a LOT of heating. Having my gaming machine add to the heat of the house is just a bonus. My TV providing 700W of heat? Bonus! Of course, the cost of electrical heat is higher than natural gas heat, but that heat pushed out from the computer reduces the total heat I need from natural gas. A bit of lost efficiency ($/but) yes, but you cannot consider it waste heat for most of the year.

Oh, and I upgrade on a 3 or 4 year cycle, so there is ongoing power efficiency gains, but there is absolutely no way that spending $1000s every 3 years will balance out the "savings" in lost electricity. In terms of effect on the environment, where I live the only fossil fuel used to generate electricity is natural gas, and that represents 15% of electrical generation.

Re:If only his hands were closer together......goa

[Firethorn]

Newegg.

"Requires 42A on the 12V Rail" = 504 Watts.

Re:Millis started the site http://hardware.slashdo

[Anonymous Coward]

about:config, search for 'trim' then set it to false. Problem solved.

Re:If only his hands were closer together......goa

[cfalcon]

Amazon and New Egg and probably like a million other places.

http://www.amazon.com/XFX-Clos...

Study Flawed from the Start

[Traciatim]

I'm not usually one to be the person to call out the study, but as soon as I saw the test system for efficiency using a G3258 while performance remained consistent from the original system which was equipped with a 4820K I knew something was wrong. Their entire gaming benchmark suite consisted of Unigen Heaven which is specifically designed to test GPU performance excluding external factors like a CPU holding things back.

They need to redo the test and show the same performance scaling in real world gaming scenarios if they want gamers to take them seriously while still making power conscious decisions.

Re:Study Flawed from the Start

[rsmith-mac]

Agreed. Pretty much everything about this test screams that it was either done in ignorance or that it was constructed specifically to get the desired results.

From a hardware standpoint they are essentially comparing a high performance 2013 system to a very unbalanced 2014 system. The 2013 system is something of a worst case scenario: the CPU (i7-4820K) and GPU (GTX 780) are lower tier binned products that typically have lower power efficiency than their more expensive siblings (e.g. 4960X and GTX 780 Ti) since they came out of the factor with defective units and/or worse power characteristics than a prime chip. Even the RAM is a poor choice, being a 1.65v kit rather than 1.5v as is standard for DDR3. To top it off they used a 550W PSU, which for a system with that kind of power consumption is undersized. This causes it to run closer to its limits, and PSU efficiency drops off after 80% or so.

Meanwhile the 2014 system is an odd hodge-podge of parts that seems to be picked precisely to minimize power consumption under very limited circumstances. That system combines a high-performance GTX 970 (a well-regarded card for efficiency) with a low-end Pentium G3258, and then goes with an even larger 760W PSU.

The problem with this whole test is that they're clearly using a extremely GPU limited test metric, which is why performance doesn't drop despite the significant downgrade in CPUs. A GTX 970 is going to be CPU-limited in most games when paired with that processor, which is why "balance" is a concern when building such a system.

But perhaps the most baffling part is the monitor choice. They ended up using an old (circa 2008) Apple HD Cinema Display for the 2013 system, which is a 23" CCFL-backlit IPS display. Meanwhile the 2014 system switches that out for a 24" LED-backlit TN display. Even ignoring the age difference for a moment (backlighting tech makes a difference here), you generally don't see users swap between IPS and TN. Either someone favors IPS for viewing angles, color space, and color stability (while eating the power costs intrinsic to making that happen), or they favor TN for the fast response times. They're not equivalent displays beyond the fact that they're both displays.

Overall I really can't shake the feeling that this was rigged from the start for promotional purposes. The only way these tests and configurations make sense is if you built these systems to get the desired outcome, all the while focusing exclusively on GPU performance to hide the downgrade of the other components.

Look at the prices

[dlenmn]

Although it's not perfect, money is a decent proxy for environmental harm.* So, if a $100 upgrade will save you $200 in electricity over its lifetime, then the upgrade will probably do more environmental good than harm. However, if a $500 upgrade will save you $100 in electricity, then you're probably doing more harm than good.

* At least for normal consumer goods, the price _roughly_ reflects the amount of energy and resources to manufacture the good, which roughly reflects the environmental harm. It's by no means a perfect metric, but it's a start. Some goods clearly do not fit this model. For example, a painting costs almost no resources to produce but can sell for a high price. Some computer parts are similar. For example, sometimes identical graphics cards are deliberately crippled (lower clock speed, parts of the processor disabled, etc.) just to create different price points. Both cards have the same environmental cost to produce but can have very different sale prices. However, that means the environmental cost is best represented by the cost of the _cheapest_ version. So maybe the aforementioned $500 upgrade really costs $50 to produce and thus has a positive environmental impact.

(Totally off topic: I wonder about the environmental impact of moving to cities. Say you move to a city, sell your car, etc. but your income remains constant; you instead spend money on a new TV, more beef for dinner, etc. Then it's not obvious to me that you're having a significant, positive environmental impact.)

Re:Look at the prices

[Anguirel]

Response to your OT thought: It's still probably a net gain, mostly because gas-powered personal vehicles are just horribly inefficient. Consider this: it is more efficient to use the gasoline intended for your vehicle in a full-size gasoline-fueled power plant, generate electricity, send that electricity across power lines across long distances and incur lossage there, store it in a battery, incurring additional lossage, then use that to power an electric vehicle. All of those extra losses are still more efficient than just using the gasoline directly.

So, let's look at electric car usage (which, as noted, is more efficient than a gas car). The average EV uses around 30 kWh for 100 miles. Helpfully, this is pretty close to the average daily usage for an American home, which is around 30kWh as well. Average driving is ~33 miles a day. Given that your major usages for power are likely to be heating or cooling related (e.g. refrigeration, A/C, washer/dryer), I don't think minor increases from a larger TV and such will match the significant difference of reducing the initial consumption by 1/4.

Re:Look at the prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Although it's not perfect, money is a decent proxy for environmental harm.* So, if a $100 upgrade will save you $200 in electricity over its lifetime, then the upgrade will probably do more environmental good than harm. However, if a $500 upgrade will save you $100 in electricity, then you're probably doing more harm than good.

* At least for normal consumer goods, the price _roughly_ reflects the amount of energy and resources to manufacture the good, which roughly reflects the environmental harm. It's by no means a perfect metric, but it's a start. Some goods clearly do not fit this model. For example, a painting costs almost no resources to produce but can sell for a high price. Some computer parts are similar. For example, sometimes identical graphics cards are deliberately crippled (lower clock speed, parts of the processor disabled, etc.) just to create different price points. Both cards have the same environmental cost to produce but can have very different sale prices. However, that means the environmental cost is best represented by the cost of the _cheapest_ version. So maybe the aforementioned $500 upgrade really costs $50 to produce and thus has a positive environmental impact.

(Totally off topic: I wonder about the environmental impact of moving to cities. Say you move to a city, sell your car, etc. but your income remains constant; you instead spend money on a new TV, more beef for dinner, etc. Then it's not obvious to me that you're having a significant, positive environmental impact.)

The new tv is more energy efficient, so is probably a net win if you watch a lot of tv (3hrs a day?). You will spend more on that steak dinner, but more of it will be priced into the service than meat. A $10 steak at a country diner is not half the size of one in downtown for $20 - it's probably the same size, or smaller really, but might be a better cut.

The main benefit to the environment of public transit capable city living, besides less commute pollution, is dense population=high housing prices=smaller homes = lower heating/cooling bills and associated pollution from those things. I don't recall exactly off hand, but the NYC population has about a third the per capita energy consumption of the rest of the country, on average. Why? because the 1.5 million riders a day taking one train (line, the green Lexington line) save a hell of a lot of gasoline vs car commuters, and a 600 sqrtft apartment is a lot easier to keep comfortable than a 2600sqr ft house baking in the sun or exposed to wind in winter.

Re:Look at the prices

[dlenmn]

Sorry for the poor wording. I didn't mean to suggest that the environmental cost of the TV would be its electricity usage. I meant that, given constant income and without the cost of a car, people might put more money into purchasing many new pieces of consumer electronics -- not just a single TV. A. E.g. if you don't have to pay for a car, why not buy a new TV, a new stereo system, a new phone, and a new computer! Likewise for beef. I've seen the statistic that, environmentally speaking, a pound of beef is equivalent to a gallon of gasoline. My thoughts aren't totally abstract. I've been thinking about these questions after seeing friends move to cities. For example, I have two friends who recently moved to a large city and commented how much more beef they eat now. Beef and consumer electronics are only two examples. There could also be increased spending on travel, furniture, etc. Are those captured in your figure about energy consumption? My guess is no, because the energy is expended outside NYC.

I do think spending money on things other than a car is probably a net benefit. However, my point is that the effect is likely tempered because the money is generally spent on other goods. I.e. the trick to reducing your environmental footprint is to buy fewer things in general -- not just spend less on cars. This may be less of an issue in NYC because so much money is spent on rent (which my theory doesn't apply to) that consumption of everything else is cut.

Re:Look at the prices

[dlenmn]

Response to your OT thought: It's still probably a net gain, mostly because gas-powered personal vehicles are just horribly inefficient. Consider this: it is more efficient to use the gasoline intended for your vehicle in a full-size gasoline-fueled power plant, generate electricity, send that electricity across power lines across long distances and incur lossage there, store it in a battery, incurring additional lossage, then use that to power an electric vehicle. All of those extra losses are still more efficient than just using the gasoline directly.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not saying it's false, I'm just curious.

a larger TV and such will match the significant difference of reducing the initial consumption by 1/4.

I didn't mean to suggest that buying a single TV would incur that much of an environmental cost. I meant the TV to be an example of increased spending on other things. I.e. if you're not spending money on a car, you might spend the money on more consumer electronics (not just a single TV), more travel, more beef, more furniture, etc. I think you're right that spending money on a car has less environmental impact than spending an equivalent amount of money on most other goods. I'm just saying that the effect of getting rid of the car is tempered by spending money on other things, and production of those other things are not captured in household electricity usage because they are produced outside the household. I.e the trick to reducing your environmental footprint is to buy fewer things in general -- not just spending less on cars.

Re:Look at the prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the poor wording. I didn't mean to suggest that the environmental cost of the TV would be its electricity usage. I meant that, given constant income and without the cost of a car, people might put more money into purchasing many new pieces of consumer electronics -- not just a single TV. A. E.g. if you don't have to pay for a car, why not buy a new TV, a new stereo system, a new phone, and a new computer! Likewise for beef. I've seen the statistic that, environmentally speaking, a pound of beef is equivalent to a gallon of gasoline. My thoughts aren't totally abstract. I've been thinking about these questions after seeing friends move to cities. For example, I have two friends who recently moved to a large city and commented how much more beef they eat now. Beef and consumer electronics are only two examples. There could also be increased spending on travel, furniture, etc. Are those captured in your figure about energy consumption? My guess is no, because the energy is expended outside NYC.

I do think spending money on things other than a car is probably a net benefit. However, my point is that the effect is likely tempered because the money is generally spent on other goods. I.e. the trick to reducing your environmental footprint is to buy fewer things in general -- not just spend less on cars. This may be less of an issue in NYC because so much money is spent on rent (which my theory doesn't apply to) that consumption of everything else is cut.

GP AC here. Its not 100%, but it is generally a safe assumption that everytime a new generation of stuff comes out, that displaces not the LAST generation, but the OLDEST generation... Most people aren't rich, and most non-affluent people don't throw useful things away. Look at the for sale section of craigslist for an example. I sold my old TV there when I got a new one for example (37" 4k ->50" 4k). So it's not like MOST people shred their old gear and toss it in a river. My old 4k LCD become someone else new. Maybe their non4k went for $50 to someone replacing an old tube. At the extreme scale, you have hoarders, but they aren't plugging in the old TVs and running them 24/7 so their energy cost is negligible.

Beef: Let's suppose I drop my 20mile daily one way commute and eat an entire pound of beef everyday instead as a reward for walking 1 mile. 40 miles RT in traffic is easily 2 gallons a day (most cars are not plug in priuses), so even if I have 4 quarter pounders a day above my usual McFare, the environment still gains a 50% energy reduction. Your urban friends probably eat an extra pound a week, if that. The national average is only about 2 pounds of red meat per week after all - so call it 1#/wk for farm folk who have easy access to fresh, cheap veggies to snack on vs the city slickers at 3#/wk so a huge exaggeration and it's still 90% better on energy use to eat burgers and walk than drive to work.
- http://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/statistics/per-capita-consumption-of-poultry-and-livestock-1965-to-estimated-2012-in-pounds/

Tempered spending: People in NYC spend a lot on food, bars, movies, museums and other "get out of the little apartment" stuff. That's more a factor of them having money in the first place though, and not needing to commute 20 hours a week. Sure, eating cold algae sludge and living in mud huts is more eco friendly than an air conned skyrise (or ranch house for that matter), but so is murdering the neighbors. I don't want to do that. I want to consume MORE entertainment and have more fun. If you can do it in a more energy efficient fashion, great. But you can charge me ten dollars a kilowatt for electricity, I will still charge my cell phone and read at night, because I would give up almost everything else before I give up light at night.

NYC: Compare apples to apples. Obviously they don't include the transportation cost of bringing Maine lobster in to town in the per capita energy consumption figures JUST for NYC. But they don't include it in the figures for Butte Montana either, so they don't need to for the comparison to be valid. Google it if interested:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/greenest_place_in_the_us_its_not_where_you_think/2203/

Re:Look at the prices

[Anguirel]

[1] Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient.

I pulled it long ago from the sources cited in that footnote (along with all the car analogies used here on Slashdot). 6 years old, but I dont' think ICEs have changed much in that time.

Re:Look at the prices

[toddestan]

Both cards have the same environmental cost to produce but can have very different sale prices. However, that means the environmental cost is best represented by the cost of the _cheapest_ version. So maybe the aforementioned $500 upgrade really costs $50 to produce and thus has a positive environmental impact.

I wouldn't count on that. The $50 card may have cost $100 to produce. It was going to be a $250 card, but when it failed to meet the high-level specs they crippled it and sold it at lower-level specs $50, as to only take a $50 loss on it rather than a $100 loss if they had just scrapped it.

What?

[Fragnet]

the impact of climate change on the insurance industry

A huge energy saving could be made if this guy just fucking dies.

Except he's full of shit

[Sycraft-fu]

His numbers are way off. First a gaming computer is not "three refrigerators." A fridge/freezer combo uses like 400-800 watts when spun up depending on size and if it is frostless or not. Your typical reasonably high end gaming computer (high end quad core processor, single high end GPU) uses in the 300-400 watt range when fully spun up. There are, of course, higher end systems but they are not common as they cost a lot, for not a ton of gain.

Well the idea that there are tons of components or settings that'll just tank energy use is stupid. In terms of settings, ya those are default. By default a system will put its processor and GPU in to an idle state when not heavily loaded, and indeed most systems draw 90 watts or less when idle. In terms of componentry, there really isn't a ton of room for gain.

Like with PSUs. Any reasonable quality PSU that you might see in a gamer build is at least 80% efficient, and usually more like 85%. Go all the way to the high end, which many gamers already do, and you are only pushing 90-92% max. A gain, sure, but not much. If a system draws 300 watts DC going from an 85% (bronze) PSU to a 92% (platinum) PSU is the difference between 350 and 326 watts at the wall.

Then there's things like GPUs and CPUs. Well guess what? A give one is as efficient as it can be at a given performance level. There aren't the better and worse ones. You can't buy the efficient model GTX 980 and the inefficient model. They are the same. You can swap one kind of component for another and maybe gain efficiency. Like you can swap an AMD 390X for an nVidia GTX 980Ti and that'll use less power, but what if you want the AMD card?

Also there's the issue that usually the new ones are more efficient than older ones. Fair enough but in addition to the cost of upgrading that ignores the energy cost of producing the cards. Suggesting that everyone buy the newest shit all the time is not realistic, or energy efficient (a lot of our energy use goes in to making things).

This guy just doesn't know anything about computers. He's convinced that there's these vast optimizations that could happen, if only people wanted it. Not really the case.

Re:Except he's full of shit

[JoeMerchant]

http://michaelbluejay.com/elec...

"In most homes the refrigerator is the second-largest user of electricity (13.7%), right after the air conditioner (14.1%)" mostly because they are old and inefficient.

Modern energy efficient refrigerators use ~425 to 600kWh / year.

You say a gaming rig draws ~350W "when fully spun up", I say my 2nd gen PS3 draws over 200W when sitting at the menu bar "doing nothing." The article is talking about gamers that never let their systems go to sleep, so let's settle on 300W draw while powered up, and figure your average gamer leaves his system on 24-7, so it doesn't have problems from thermal cycling, or whatever their excuse is - so:

300W running for 24x365 hours = 2600kWh, or about 5 "modern" refrigerators.

Re:Except he's full of shit

[AmiMoJo]

Oh yeah, I don't disagree. The guy is severely lacking a clue. I was only commenting on the reaction.

Re:Except he's full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break it to you, but unless those gamers are running CPU stress tests when not using their PC, it's not going to be using 300 W at night when they are sleeping. Even 90 seems rather high to me (unless you're using AMD, or some ridiculous Xeon server processor).
GPU is barely doing anything when idle, and that's the majority of power usage.
Disks can spin down too (why haven't you switched to SSD yet?).

Re:Except he's full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

"so let's settle on 300W draw while powered up"

Rather than making up random numbers, you might spend a moment with google looking at the idle power use of computers. 300W is a ridiculous number.

Re:Except he's full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

You say a gaming rig draws ~350W "when fully spun up", I say my 2nd gen PS3 draws over 200W when sitting at the menu bar "doing nothing." The article is talking about gamers that never let their systems go to sleep, so let's settle on 300W draw while powered up, and figure your average gamer leaves his system on 24-7, so it doesn't have problems from thermal cycling, or whatever their excuse is - so:

300W running for 24x365 hours = 2600kWh, or about 5 "modern" refrigerators.

Nope... under my desk at home i've got a i7 4790k + nVidia 980Ti + 2 SSDs + 1 HDD - so i'd say reasonably fitting for the "gaming computer" label - and it all idles around 60-ish watts... pushing up to some 400w fully loaded in demanding games and with a mild overclock - so again... nope...

Subsidy?

[Xelios]

Sounds good, where do I pick up my Green Gaming subsidy for the new hardware?

It's pure fluff from an uninformed writer

[Sycraft-fu]

Guy doesn't know anything about what he's talking about.

For one there is the newer thing as you note. Yes, newer stuff is more efficient. At a given performance target (FPS for a given scene complexity, number of MFlops, whatever) newer hardware is better than older stuff. Ok, fine but cost of always upgrading aside (something gamers do more than most people) there is the issue of energy of production. A large amount of human energy use goes in to making the stuff we use. If you want to save energy, a big part of it is buying less shit, trying to make stuff last longer. You don't see that energy cost directly, it is rolled in to the product, but it is very real.

Then there is the fact that, as you note, gamers tend to use better components anyhow. Like the PSU thing. The higher end the gamer, the better the PSU they tend to want and thus the more efficient it tends to be. I personally have an 80 Plus Platinum unit in my system because it was the highest efficiency, best built, longest lasting unit I could get my hands on. It was expensive, way more than most people are willing to pay for a PSU, but as a crazy gamer I'm ok with that.

Guy is just an idiot.

Poor console sleep drives energy waste

[MountainLogic]

Puns aside about consoles insomnia. Wasting $100s of dollars of you power bill every year is not a serious concern for the video game industry. In 2008 the NRDC, the US EPA with their EnergyStarWalmart beat the console industry about the head and neck and the video game industry managed to sandbag any regulation that even a GE or Sylvania could not for lighting. The reason is simple sloth and incompetence. Simply put the problem is not energy used during game play , but the lack of a meaningful sleep mode. This lack of sleep mode is driven by poor APIs to book mark game status and put the console into sleep mode. The other energy driver is the console companies instant on collecting detailed data of how you use your device and uploading it when you are not playing plus forcing add and other "content" down to your console when it should be sleeping.

Don't really care

[mrun4982]

Power consumption is really only a problem when my gaming computer is awake and that's not that often. The power consumption when sleeping is minimal and not worth worrying about. Even if I were to run my gaming PC 24x7 and never have it sleep, it only costs about $5 / month and I don't really care about that. If we were talking about a major household appliance then sure, I care about its power consumption but not when it comes to my gaming computer.

What "operational settings to certain components"?

[Dr. Manhattan]

That sounds like something that could be applied to a lot of existing hardware quickly, and should logically have its own heading, but I didn't see it in a very quick skim of the PDF. What kind of settings are they talking about?

Re:What "operational settings to certain component

[Anubis IV]

I didn't see it either. If you find it, I'd love to know.

Guess what?

[Sycraft-fu]

1) A PS3 is not a gaming PC, which is what we are talking about.

2) PCs go in to idle states BY DEFAULT, you have to work to turn them off. My PC, an exceptionally high powered one, idles at about 90 watts. A more normal PC idles at 50 or so. Not turning off, not suspending, not doing anything special. The processors normal C-states and throttling which are enabled by default.

3) You can turn your PC off. I do.

Re:Millis started the site http://hardware.slashdo

[sexconker]

Is there an about:config flag to disable Mozilla's intentional sabotage of their own company?

Same Perf @ Less Power = More Money

[allquixotic]

It's the classical "iron triangle" (aka constraint triangle): you have three sides to a triangle; performance, power consumption, and cost. Pick any two that you want to be favorable, and the more favorable you make them, the more unfavorable the third will be.

Nvidia and AMD discrete cards for desktops are designed to tug on the performance and cost sides as much as possible, leaving only a passing thought for power savings. Granted, it's reasonably efficient when in standby and not that bad at idle, but it's horrendous under load.

If you want a GPU that's less horrendous under load, without compromising on performance, expect to pay a LOT more for it. And in most cases, because of market forces, you're also going to take at least a slight performance hit.

For instance, the GTX 980M is way more power efficient than the GTX 980 desktop card, because of the design constraints of laptops. It's effectively power efficient by design because of the form factor. But the performance is notably worse, and buying a laptop that has one is way more expensive than buying a desktop with "good enough" components (some kind of recent i7 and 8GB or more memory) and a GTX 980 or even 980 Ti.

We're not going to see chips that maintain the desired performance level (the one constraint that most people are unwilling to compromise on if they're owning a "real" gaming PC) while saving on energy, unless the cost goes so high that only the most elite can afford it.

We see similar problems in the car market, too. The Prius and Prius C are relatively inexpensive (the C is very inexpensive), great fuel efficiency - though not as good as an EV or PHEV - but the performance is terrible. The Tesla Model S achieves amazing performance, range, and efficiency in a pure EV package, but no "commoner" can afford it, only the upper crust. Then there are loads and loads of cars that are not particularly efficient, very cheap, and have serviceable performance.

Who's paying for the more expensive chips that give us the same performance we're already getting but with less energy consumption? The gamer? Why would they do that?

P.S. - Before you accuse me of not thinking of "the greater good", I *drive* a Prius C. I bet the same scientists who wrote this paper drive conventional SUVs.

Re:Same Perf @ Less Power = More Money

[Traciatim]

"Scientist" . . .http://sites.google.com/site/greeningthebeast/website-builder/Nat.jpg

I Win!

[kackle]

Although this isn't high-end gaming, I noticed a couple of interesting power measurements at work:

My 10-year old Dell desktop, running Windows XP and no anti-virus (AV) boots ~25% faster and draws ~30% less power overall (idle & taxed with performance software) than the new guy's new Dell laptop that runs Windows 7 & Norton AV. We can both run all the same software effectively (albeit all my versions are several years older), except that I have a different brand of PCB design software than he; I'm guessing if I ran his PCB program my computer might drag.

Also, my ball mouse draws 1/5 the power that his optical mouse does! That was a surprise, too. I wonder whether a ball mouse is a better idea for laptop users when it comes to extending battery life.

My single CRT drew 1/3 more power than an LCD. My new, micromanaging, pointy-haired boss forced me to toss it(?), and replace it with two LCD widescreens. So now I draw 50% MORE than my single CRT did. My productivity is unchanged. Sigh...

Did you know?

[Tyr07]

Did you know, if you buy a solar panel, attach it to a 12v regulator, buy multiple batteries and operate on solar power only, you can significantly reduce the power your PC consumes and pay less in hydro? You'll only need to charge it on grid during colder seasons when there's less sun and more cloud!

We can always spend more money to consume less of a resource. You can buy a small car instead of a truck too. It doesn't always work. Sometimes we need / want a truck for the things we do.

Sometimes I need 8 cores. However, I do let it balance power, reduce clock speed when not in full use.

Doubling the max load is a fallacy

[Jumunquo]

A larger power supply consuming more power is a common layman's misconception.
A double-the-load power supply being more efficient is a common gamer's misconception that came from a rule of thumb that is no longer true.

For a power supply to get a 80+ gold rating, it must be independently tested to have at least 90% efficiency at 50% load and 87% efficiency at 20% and 100% load. In the past, when I searched for the actual efficiency curves of Seasonic power supplies I was shopping for, I found that in reality, it's a plateau with less than 1% dropoff until almost reaching 100%.

However, the sub-20% load mark is a different story. There is no efficiency requirement here, and most power supplies have very bad efficiency below 20% load. An overly large power supply can cause your idle usage to fall under the 20% mark. If your max load is 500W and idle is 150W, then a 1200W supply is probably at less than 50% efficient at idle (from most efficiency curves I've seen - ymmv), and that's 150W lost. In this case, I would recommend a 600W or 650W power supply. Definitely nothing over 750W.

Re:Doubling the max load is a fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is informative. Mod up!

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

So, we can either lower our framerate (which is already below 60 fps because of shitty ports) or buy more efficient hardware.
More efficient hardware will cost hundreds of dollars. This hardware will only get maybe 30 % better efficiency (or maybe 50 watts) than the stuff i currently have, and will last me 2 years at most.

If i left my computer running at full usage for 2 years, i would save at most 90$ worth of electricity. My game playing experience would not be any better either.

This is a very very extreme case too. I rarely play games for more than an hour a day anyway, so saving just a few dollars on electricity when spending 300$ on new hardware for the exact same experience is not worth it. It would be much better to buy LED lights.

Work Vans/Trucks vs Cars

[Anonymous Coward]

All the tradesmen/builders/electricians/plumbers in the world could save the world from extra emissions if - instead of using a big V6 or V8 work van/ute - they switched to a contemporary 4 cylinder sedan!