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

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.

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: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.