Building a Green PC

Kermit writes "Ars Technica has put together a green DIY system building guide. The idea is to build a PC offering decent energy efficiency as well as solid performance. The 'Green Gaming Box' draws about 125W at full load (not including a monitor); the minimalist 'Extreme Green Box' uses a mini-ITX case and a VIA CPU-motherboard combo for about 30W at typical load. If you want to mix and match components, or modify your current system so that it uses less energy, there are plenty of options for swapping out individual components."

"Green Computing"

[cccc828]

As long as rain forests are stubbed for easier access to copper mines
As long as local people are poisoned by the toxic byproducts of metal refinement
As long as people in Africa or Eastern Europe dissable old computers without any protective clothing
As long as children assemble computers for $1/hour in Asia

I refuse to equal "green computing" and enviromental friendly.

In truth it is just another catchy phrase to sell you yet a new computer. Buying a new computer does nature more harm than just keeping your old computer.

If you're serious about green, go matte black

[parlyboy]

Get a used Thinkpad.

Lower energy usage. Recycled. Probably faster than the VIA. And you can beat a burglar to death with it.

What's not to like?

Re:"Green Computing"

[bhima]

I think you have confused the concepts of ethical and green. That and disable and disassemble.

Not that I wholly disagree with your sentiments.

Green == production and Green power

[emj]

The most important part of getting a Green computer is the cost to the environment to produce the computer. Buying new computers just to get a green computer is hence very stupid. Better than try to build a green computer would be to use an old computer and go over to green electricty. If you are going to buy a slow VIA computer yo umight as well have an old computer.

The problem with costs today is that no long term costs are included in prices, copper mines that poison areas bigger than Los Angeles have no obligation to pay for what they destroy. The mining inudstry is very very dirty, they some are situated near natural reserves, which mean we are going to have to fix everything after they have shut down.

There are mines in Sweden that are still being cleaned up, 30 years after shutting down.

Re:"Green Computing"

[upside]

There are obviously various dimensions to "going green":
1) Not buying. Reuse instead.
2) Buying as little as possible.
3) When buying, buy environmentally friendly.

You can take a queue from data centers where power and heat are major issues. Instead of having a spinny whirly storage (or even solid state) on every PC, use NAS or SAN. If you've got to have 2nd - Nth PCs, use PXE, NFS and iSCSI for storage. Virtualization can help save power, too.

Re:"Green Computing"

[Robot waste unit]

Exactly. The energy footprint is fairly easy to offset with a renewable power source. The cost of manufacturing and disposing of the thing is where the problem lies.

Re:"Green Computing"

[upside]

You're right. From the manufacturer's point of view being greener is a competitive advantage. It's up to consumers - and depending on your political views, government regulation - to make sure it's a big advantage. Don't use the "out to make money" an excuse to disregard environmental considerations and personal responsibility when making purchases. "Manufacturers of hybrid cars are just out to make money, I might as well buy an SUV". On the other hand, as an employee you can also affect the behaviour of your company. Keep asking what the company is doing to reduce waste. Phrase it so it sounds appealing - saving power and improved efficiency save costs for the company.

hmm.

[apodyopsis]

build modular components that can be combined, recycled and handed down. the trick to being green is to mandate power efficiency and buy/recycle intelligently. for computers it maddens me that people get a top of the range high power monster to browse the net and do word processing, when their old PC would of done the job fine. MS and their ilk persuade people to upgrade by relying on things like redundant feature creep and security FUD to stop them using older versions, but in reality older versions could be relied on to do the work if security patches were updated. you do not need a quad core 2GB machine to read email, but you do need a whizzy machine to run vista and thats were MS makes their money. use that older PC as a work horse for 5 years instead of 1 and you have been five times more green. on another note with LCD screen, I was thinking the other month if anybody has every consider a LCD monitor where the backplate can be tilted down flat with a mirror surface to shine sunlight up into the back of the screen - aka a natural backlight? i ask as thats one of the major power drains on a laptop and you would not need that much sunlight to make it readable. roll on an epaper laptop with flash storage for extreme low power/long battery usage. how an "Asus EEE-Paper"?

Re:I don't have a green PC

[Anonymous Coward]

However, I DO ride a motorcycle, pumping out far less CO2 than almost any other motorised road vehicle.

As will your lungs, after you die in an automobile accident since nothing lies between your body and the pavement. I guess the resulting hamburger that is your corpse will fertilize plants, so yeah that's kinda green. I prefer two tons of steel wrapped around me and the other 70 MPH idiots on the road, environment be damned.

Green Software + Hardware

[Ngarrang]

We would not need to worry about the topic of 'green' PCs if we did not have such bloated software that continues to require ever more CPU cycles per second to accomplish their task. There was a time when software was written in to be tight and memory efficient. WordPerfect for DOS comes to mind.

Low-power PCs are a good idea, sure, but we need our software to also be efficient. The two, together, could get us a long way toward truly 'green' computing.

And while I am ranting about bad software design...

AC-to-DC conversion is messy and lossy. Fortunately, we do have servers that can take DC directly from a shared AC-DC power supply. This concept needs to move into the home. Why should my PC, monitor, printer and God knows what else all each have their own AC-DC power converter box? Homes could have a single large converter and then have DC-only outlets for all those appliances that need it.

Re:"Green Computing"

[BVis]

Using a few watts less on your gaming rig is not going to make any difference to your "carbon footprint" or your electricity bill.

That just isn't true. The generation of electricity still releases CO2 into the atmosphere; less electricity generated = less CO2. Not to mention that your electricity bill is (generally) directly proportional to how much energy you use, so if you use less energy, your bill is lower.

What you're saying is that if I have 20 marbles in a bag, and take two out, I still have 20 marbles in the bag. It's just not true.

All these little steps add up over the long run. Reducing your energy consumption by 3% might not seem like a huge difference, but if millions of people do it, it makes a difference. I recently measured how much power my computer rack uses, and found that I could cut usage by 25% through a few simple steps (like making sure the CRT I sometimes use on my firewall is powered down, setting the drives in my system to spin down after a certian amount of idle time, etc.) The whole thing (three computers, two monitors, various networking bits, laser printer) consumes 300 watts at idle. That 100 watts I save from shutting off the monitor adds up to 584 kW/h each year (if it's off 16 hours each day), which in my state keeps 7,475 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and saves me $97 in electricity annually. From only shutting off a monitor!

The shit adds up. Throwing your hands in the air because there's no one thing you can do that's a magic bullet for the energy problem is cynical and lazy.

Quick and cheap advice

[Aceticon]

Here's a couple of quick and cheap tricks for turning your existing computer greener:

• Get one of these Intelli Panel [oneclickpower.com] or similar (there are other brands). Basically it's an "intelligent" panel where you plug your computer to a master socket and all the peripherals to the other sockets. When the computer is on, all the other sockets get power, when the computer is off, all the other sockets have no power. If you add up the trickle power consumed in standby mode by the power sources of all the peripherals (usually at least 3 - monitor, printer and loudspeakers) you will see that this thing pays itself after a while (for the typical techie setup this thing pays itself in no time)
• Under-clock your CPU. Really! Just do the exact opposite of all those over-clocking articles: reduce the frequency (say, 10%), reduce the Voltage if possible, remove the enormous fan from the top of your CPU cooler. The power vs frequency behaviour of a CPU is non-linear - especially at the top of it's frequency range - so a small reduction in speed = a large reduction in power consumed. See http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3fe47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWDT05003_WinHEC05.ppt [microsoft.com] (page 13) for an example. Ditching the fan and getting a quieter machine in the process is just a pleasant side effect of this.
• Under-clock the GPU and memory of your graphics card. (i bet that at this point most hard-core gamers out there are doubting my geek credentials). Ditch the fan if you can. Same rationale as for the CPUs.
• If you still have a CRT monitor, get an LCD one instead. No explanation needed here IMHO

This should be enough to save you quite some $$$ in your energy bill and polish up your green credentials.

For a more radical approach, consider getting a notebook instead of a desktop for your next upgrade: notebooks will, by design, consume less power than desktops.

Re:"Green Computing"

[gosand]

There are obviously various dimensions to "going green":
1) Not buying. Reuse instead.
2) Buying as little as possible.
3) When buying, buy environmentally friendly.

I am sure some people here would be shocked, but I run a Duron 1.3 processor, with a Zalman fanless heatsink, and 768 MB of PC-133 memory. I run dual displays (CRTs) but they shut off after 5 minutes of inactivity. The machine is up all the time (current uptime is 70 days), so I am sure I am pulling some power. I live in AZ, and in the summer it get HOT in my office... so I rigged dryer hose to pipe the PS air out into my garage. (luckily, right next to my office) I installed a low-speed fan on the garage side to help pull the air. It made a very noticeable difference in the temperature in my office. My buddy was having issues with his P4 3.2 machine, and he just bought a new Dell. So he gave the old one to me. It turned out the video card was fried, and one of the PSU fans was dead. Instead of buying a new PSU, I just hard-wired the fan on the PSU to run off of one of the 5v connections. In my area, you can put out your bulk trash once a month. I saw one of my neighbors put out a PC... I thought I could scavenge it for parts. Upon getting it home, I found out it was a fully working Sempron 3200 system! It only had a 30GB HDD and 256 RAM, but was fully working. So now I have two fully working PCs sitting here. I'll probably replace my Linux machine (Duron) with the P4, and my dusty Windows machine (Athlon 900 slot!) with the Sempron, after buying a memory upgrade.

It just amazes me what people are willing to just throw away. Both of those computers were only 3-4 years old. While anything remotely new would blow it away in performance, they are completely usable for daily use.

45nm GPUs will be a benefit gamer.

[BrendaEM]

Fourty-Five nanometer GPUs will be a benefit gamer, until then, Nvidia, ATI, and Intel should work more on 2D power consumption, and adaptive underclocking.