Gaming Computers Offer Huge, Untapped Energy Savings Potential

Posted by timothy on Tuesday September 1, 2015 @02:24AM from the why-do-you-hate-the-earth? dept.

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.

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Power saving settings are annoying by mikethe1337 · 2015-09-01 02:42 · Score: 5, Informative

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.