Results tagged “green computer”

A green PC is the sum of its parts. Credit: bit-tech.net

A "green" PC isn't really energy efficient if it consumes less electricity at the expense of performance. That's the subject of bit-tech.net's excellent article that tackles the green claims often made by PC component makers. By pitting various PC parts against one another, Richard Swinburne draws up a pretty good picture of how to balance energy savings without sacrificing computational power.

Take, for instance, hard drives vs. SSDs.

Surprisingly, the SSD doesn't save us that much power either - just 2 - 3W again on top of the 5,400 - 5,900RPM drives at idle and when writing, however compared to the performance drives from Seagate and Western Digital the difference is a more considerable 7W per drive. You're unlikely to have many SSDs unless you're in enterprise storage, where 7W a pop (or more for 10 - 15k SAS drives) means power savings abound.

Beyond storage, a lot also hinges on the type of processor (AMD or Intel), memory, power supply and motherboard. Selecting the wrong one can not only blow the efficiency gains of the rest, but also fail to deliver the performance boost you'd expect by pumping more electricity through them. And vice versa.

It goes to show that an energy efficient -- yet very capable -- rig is truly the sum of its parts.

Adding a hard drive to your Windows PC is an easy way to expand storage capacity if you find yourself running out of room for your files. But there are two problems with this approach.

First, it'll cost you money. There are bargain basement drives out there, but they're unlikely to be of the energy efficient variety. Which leads us to the second point, power savings. Installing another drive adds yet another component that you have to keep powered. And while heat-wise they pale in comparison to processors, they can contribute to your PC's thermal load making the fans work harder.

There is one super cheap option: delete files.

You're thinking, "Thank you, Captain Obvious!" What you may not have considered are the less obvious places to reclaim drive space, which can free up megabytes, if not gigabytes, of space.

Before you take a single step forward, an important reminder: backup your files!

Everyone needs a backup plan, no excuses. Things happen, no matter how well maintained your PC. There are tons of backup guides online and many external drives ship with software that makes it dead easy to make copies of your data. So, take this opportunity to backup (or ghost, even better) your PC and check the integrity of your backup files.

Got that? Good, then read on...