Originally Posted by adidan Lol, I think anybody who builds their own PCs is kidding themselves as to how "green" they may be. I mean, upgrading is not a "green" process in itself, even if you sell your own kit, it just means there's more kit out there requiring more resources to be used.
Lol, come on, we ain't "green", the best we can attribute to ourselves is a label of being electricity bill conscious. :)
48x0 cards have silly idle clocks, just use ati tray tool or change bios to underclock them and you will get same low idle consumption as 58x0, my clocks (2d = 160/200(default was 500/900); hd-video+3d = 730/1000 - just 2 profiles in att, switching automaticly)
Originally Posted by sotu1 Any chance we can get some numbers on how much it costs to run a high powered PC per hour vs a low powered PC per hour? That would be pretty cool :)
It depends on how much are you charged by your electrical company. They can't really do it, but perhaps they could do it in their context, that is, the London context. :D
Or, they could simply do an overall power consumption review for specified periods of time and calculate the total wattage and percentage difference and let people do their own math on the cost side of things. Then it would apply to pretty much everyone.
Originally Posted by rickysio For this article, Efficiency = Speed/Power (electrical efficiency is actually [effective energy]/[power consumed]. I assume that [effective energy] is proportional to speed.)
Letting a represent speed and b power,
a/b = E
2A/1.5B = 1.33 E
"green" and "efficiency" marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's only being compounded by global warming guilt these days. Buy a $25,000+ hybrid and "save" money on gas, or buy a $15,000 sedan that gets 35MPG and is PZEV rated. It would take longer than the 5 year loan to make up $10,000 worth of saving on gas alone...
Originally Posted by Neogumbercules "green" and "efficiency" marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's only being compounded by global warming guilt these days. Buy a $25,000+ hybrid and "save" money on gas, or buy a $15,000 sedan that gets 35MPG and is PZEV rated. It would take longer than the 5 year loan to make up $10,000 worth of saving on gas alone...
If you want to save money and save the environment, you get a 2nd hand car and keep it going for as long as you can.
If you are going to buy a brand new PC anyway, you might as well spend a bit of time and effort trying to be efficient and use less power for the benefits to heat, noise, running costs.
Gotta say the real supprise here is the sound card! Obviously it got to use some power but I never thought it would use quite so much at idle. I suppose the Xonar's that require external power use even more.
Nice bit of time invested in the Article. But I suspect that unless you generate your own power, or you have a overloaded circuit, you wont even contemplate how much your PC draws.
I think its also worth saying that the whole low power thing was driven by the masses of office computers drawing power during non active times. Rather than the individual PC enthusiast.
Even when current trends are mandating that computer are left on all the time in the Enterprise (e.g. Microsoft Networks * update services). Wake-on-Lan and standby / hibernation can lead to massive savings when managing thousands of workstations.
From what I've seen, I think Servers will always be a write off in terms of power, especially blades. I know of a particular HP chassis that needs 3 phase (440V - Australian) just to power 8 blades at once.
On an individual level I think that turning off the power from the wall socket will save more per year than PC green tech. I know my Asus MB draws 14 watts when turned off from the PSU (as opposed to from the wall socket). That's nearly half the power of my always running server/router (draws 35 watts).
it's 0c outside and i'm trying to keep my room @ 20c. all that extra power from my pc just means less money on heating, and while electricity costs more than gas - my pc is heating the room i am in so is more direct rather than heating whole building. In uk, there is only 2 months of the year where it really is wasted energy.
Originally Posted by sotu1 Any chance we can get some numbers on how much it costs to run a high powered PC per hour vs a low powered PC per hour? That would be pretty cool :)
It depends on how much are you charged by your electrical company. They can't really do it, but perhaps they could do it in their context, that is, the London context. :D
Just give the average kw/u and see what your electric company charges per kw/u.
Anyway. Is it not easier to let the PC go in standby withing 10 min of inactivity. My rig drops from 200w idle to 4w standby. Its up and running again with the touch on the mouse button. It saves a lot of energy.
Originally Posted by [USRF Obiwan]Anyway. Is it not easier to let the PC go in standby withing 10 min of inactivity. My rig drops from 200w idle to 4w standby. Its up and running again with the touch on the mouse button. It saves a lot of energy.
Unfortunately quite a number of people do not understand how to do that.
Heck, even the system administrator in my school kept being puzzled when the system went into standby mode (which I set it to, as I was spending the day there and it would waste lots of electricity if I just left it on during discussion.)
For the shame of, a system administrator should have known. ;)
Meh, who cares about 'green'? Give me the biggest and fastest anyday, if the bills get too high i'll just ban the missus from using the tumble dryer :).
Standby mode is not good for hard drives, so with way too agressive settings you will reach your maximum (WD usually have 300k load/unload count max) soon.
Relative to HD vs SSD power consumption, do not forget that to write/read the same amount of data, SSD usually takes less time thus will be more time at idle than HD.
Even if idle/load power contusion specifications are barely equal for both, if SSD is 2times faster then it will only half of the time at LOAD when comparing to HD thus being much more energy efficient...
power wise SSDs would most likely be lower, if its Samsung based SSD they are norm the lowest but the cost of them is to high,an F2 or WD green hdd would do
Originally Posted by faugusztin Standby mode is not good for hard drives, so with way too agressive settings you will reach your maximum (WD usually have 300k load/unload count max) soon.
If it gets the school to dump the lousy PoS P4 based towers quicker, then more power to me.
I really like this article but I don't like the hard drive chart. It's the only thing tested that you are likely to have more than one of so it should have been scaled differently. They should have measured the system with no drives installed (just the OS drive) and subtracted that out of the scale. If the scale showed that a green drive uses 4 watts at idle and a black drive uses 8w at idle it would have a greater impact. Their scale shows a 4% power savings, which is nothing. Now if they showed it the other way it would show a 50% power savings, which is substantial. With one hard drive it's six of one, half dozen of the other. But with a 6 drive media server it becomes a whole new thing. I know the article says the only time the would recommend green drives is for a 50w server or home theater but the chart doesn't get that point across.
I live in New York, where they actually have a delivery charge on top of my power charge. I am paying around 22 cents per kWh all together. Before I moved here I was paying 3.6 cents per kWh. If I can have 6 hard drives using the same amount of electricity as 3 I'm in.
Just a note about the ECO hard drives.
Would a lower spindle speed reduce wear & heat makeing the drives more reliable?
Eg 7200 to 5400 is 3/4 less. so if a a drive wears at a regular rate and turns 25% fewer times in a set times, would mechanicial failure rate be 25% less?
I'm not fussed about a watt or 2, it's not abig deal on my sli'd I7 wc setup.
but if i was told my data was 25% less likley to fail I'd be interested....
Also a lower speed would indicate less heat (as well as less heat as waste energy) and aso prolong life.
Having suffered a total drive failiure before a more secure drive would be of interest (even though I have 2 full coppies of all data)
Originally Posted by unknowngamer Just a note about the ECO hard drives.
Would a lower spindle speed reduce wear & heat makeing the drives more reliable?
Eg 7200 to 5400 is 3/4 less. so if a a drive wears at a regular rate and turns 25% fewer times in a set times, would mechanicial failure rate be 25% less?
I'm not fussed about a watt or 2, it's not abig deal on my sli'd I7 wc setup.
but if i was told my data was 25% less likley to fail I'd be interested....
Also a lower speed would indicate less heat (as well as less heat as waste energy) and aso prolong life.
Having suffered a total drive failiure before a more secure drive would be of interest (even though I have 2 full coppies of all data)
I'd guess around the same.. but it's just a guess
bearings last forever pretty much.. not like the big wheel tires that came apart after you hit a few rocks
Comments 26 to 46 of 46
ReplyIf we wanted to be green we could use nettops. :D
Or, they could simply do an overall power consumption review for specified periods of time and calculate the total wattage and percentage difference and let people do their own math on the cost side of things. Then it would apply to pretty much everyone.
Fixed, and added your math into the article. ;)
If you want to save money and save the environment, you get a 2nd hand car and keep it going for as long as you can.
If you are going to buy a brand new PC anyway, you might as well spend a bit of time and effort trying to be efficient and use less power for the benefits to heat, noise, running costs.
Rull nice article, just had time to glance through and read the conclusion right now, but I'll definitely give it a look later today.
Gotta say the real supprise here is the sound card! Obviously it got to use some power but I never thought it would use quite so much at idle. I suppose the Xonar's that require external power use even more.
I think its also worth saying that the whole low power thing was driven by the masses of office computers drawing power during non active times. Rather than the individual PC enthusiast.
Even when current trends are mandating that computer are left on all the time in the Enterprise (e.g. Microsoft Networks * update services). Wake-on-Lan and standby / hibernation can lead to massive savings when managing thousands of workstations.
From what I've seen, I think Servers will always be a write off in terms of power, especially blades. I know of a particular HP chassis that needs 3 phase (440V - Australian) just to power 8 blades at once.
On an individual level I think that turning off the power from the wall socket will save more per year than PC green tech. I know my Asus MB draws 14 watts when turned off from the PSU (as opposed to from the wall socket). That's nearly half the power of my always running server/router (draws 35 watts).
Just give the average kw/u and see what your electric company charges per kw/u.
Anyway. Is it not easier to let the PC go in standby withing 10 min of inactivity. My rig drops from 200w idle to 4w standby. Its up and running again with the touch on the mouse button. It saves a lot of energy.
Unfortunately quite a number of people do not understand how to do that.
Heck, even the system administrator in my school kept being puzzled when the system went into standby mode (which I set it to, as I was spending the day there and it would waste lots of electricity if I just left it on during discussion.)
For the shame of, a system administrator should have known. ;)
Even if idle/load power contusion specifications are barely equal for both, if SSD is 2times faster then it will only half of the time at LOAD when comparing to HD thus being much more energy efficient...
power wise SSDs would most likely be lower, if its Samsung based SSD they are norm the lowest but the cost of them is to high,an F2 or WD green hdd would do
If it gets the school to dump the lousy PoS P4 based towers quicker, then more power to me.
I live in New York, where they actually have a delivery charge on top of my power charge. I am paying around 22 cents per kWh all together. Before I moved here I was paying 3.6 cents per kWh. If I can have 6 hard drives using the same amount of electricity as 3 I'm in.
Would a lower spindle speed reduce wear & heat makeing the drives more reliable?
Eg 7200 to 5400 is 3/4 less. so if a a drive wears at a regular rate and turns 25% fewer times in a set times, would mechanicial failure rate be 25% less?
I'm not fussed about a watt or 2, it's not abig deal on my sli'd I7 wc setup.
but if i was told my data was 25% less likley to fail I'd be interested....
Also a lower speed would indicate less heat (as well as less heat as waste energy) and aso prolong life.
Having suffered a total drive failiure before a more secure drive would be of interest (even though I have 2 full coppies of all data)
I'd guess around the same.. but it's just a guess
bearings last forever pretty much.. not like the big wheel tires that came apart after you hit a few rocks
nice article
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