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Carbon Zero Computing: Wooden PC
Author: Richard SwinburnePublished: 18th June 2007
Yuugou: A lot more stylish and also made from wood!
It claims that, "The retailer will remove the PC's fans - which use up most of the power - and use an aluminium casing that has large ventilation slats that allow the heat to escape and uses fewer materials."
Wow! We've been looking at the wrong things all along! So it's not the hot 130W Quad Core CPUs or 200W graphics cards! It's those 1-3W PC fans that are guzzling all our juice! It seems that no one has informed PC World that fanless PSUs and case designs have been around for ages, and we've been looking at aluminium cases Lian Li and Cooler Master made since the site was launched back in 2001.
Nick Falzone is apparently ahead of his time with Sangaku and Yuuguo and so is Doug Klassen, among many others on our own forums and across the net.
It gets better as it goes on to say, "The keyboard and screen will be encased in wood - either ash or beech. Most PCs are made from steel and reinforced plastic.". No one's suggested that some plastics are easier to recycle? Where are the forests used to make these parts and are they from reputable renewable sources? Or even that extracting Aluminium is a massively power intensive process that uses a lot more electricity, and therefore carbon, than processing Steel. We can only assume PC World is using recycled aluminium exclusively which uses far less energy.
PC World finally hits the nail in the "Roffle coffin", when it says that it can save people's power usage by some "85 percent" dropping the cost of an annual electricity bill from £40 down to just £12. Regardless of the fact the machine alone will set you back nearly £600. So in electrical savings alone you'd only have to use the PC for just over 21 and a half years to make a profit.
PC World will also buy carbon credits from the third world, offsetting the final carbon count of the PC to bring it down to zero.
I suppose PC Worlds ingenuity should be rewarded, but it's just left us at BitHQ laughing our socks off at the implications of PC power usage they've implied. If you really want to save energy, recommend a notebook with a VIA processor, perhaps? And also encourage people to walk or cycle to its stores.
Don't get us wrong, we don't like to waste energy and therefore money as much as the next person, but we're focused on the real goal of getting the component companies to make more efficient products rather that just taking out a few fans from a system. Next time Ms. Patterson (from the photograph on The Telegraph website), talk to a community who knows first, yea?
If you're still able to see through your tears of laughter, let us know what you think in the forums.
Many thanks to reader, Risky, for pointing this gem out to us.
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Comments (43)
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Ergonomics, where are you?
Just a reminder, they actually paid people real money to come up with all that
you want a 0 carbon pc? make one of recycled aluminum and other stuff and use solar, hydro and wind energy, don't kill trees.
maybe they are thinking of these vantec tornado:
http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1169
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/processors/c7/
Those stupid wood cases have been out for a while now (the one the creepy lady is looking at). I was in an article with one :(
EDIT: And another thing, "carbon zero" has to do with how the pc it built too, including all the components along with what happens when they are thrown away. I may not know much but I know they aren't making the pcbs and crap out of cardboard ergo they numbers are even more BS. Someone slap them for me please?
And now you're in another article with them LOL! Sorry :o
But this time in a good way.
DXR - Via processors are great if you use a PC to not actually do anything. Atm we've got a 1.5GHz EPIA on the block and it's 10x slower than a Core 2 board: so if it takes you 10x longer to do the same task is it really more cost effective with power for your monitor, your time, everything else in the room that also has to wait for it?
Dunno about avoiding it I'll have some lol, yup pc world is yet again back in the Retard bin.
let me get that one straight. We as a country put out too much carbon, so to satiate our consciences we 'offset' these by claiming that we're actually using the allowance of some other country?!
HOW THE **** SHOULD THAT EVEN BE ALLOWED TO EXIST AS A CONCEPT!?
I mean, a lot of the currently developed countries could cut carbon emissions quite a lot, if we spent the money to fix the things that are currently wrong, however it would cost a lot of money, so its cheaper to do it to developing countries to keep them from making our mistakes
I guess it might take less energy to produce, but... come on...
Pfft, even my PC is carbon neutral, I know any CO2 created from making or powering it will eventually go back into the ground via glorious plants.
ROFL
that is too good.
"Wait...why have people been making houses out of wood for thousands of years, again?"
"Shut up!"
If Bob Geldof made computers, this is what he'd dream up :(
why are you bashing Mr. Falzone's incredible work? that is a mod that has nothing to do with PC World (thank heaven).
what rock have you been living under?
Lets switch to clean energy like hydrogen. It only gives off water vapor not the evil co2 that is a green house gas and kills us all. O crap water vapor is also a green house gas and takes up an even bigger amount of the atmosphere than co2. Well looks like "clean" energy killed the word too :(
I know I shouldn't even be replying to this but, um, do you know what a swastika looks like? Its not in there, trust me.
with pleasure
i can kind of see what boiled_elephant means...pieces of the metal form a right-facing swastika, such as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:HinduSwastika.svg
except the arms create a square in the centre
Uh, no.
But even if it did, since it's based on a Japanese styling and East Asia have many Buddists, the Swastika is used as a sign of protection. It's only Nazi Germany that adopted it as their symbol some thousand+ years later.
You can produce a highly energy efficient PC, or use recyled materials in it's production or far that matter recycle parts of discard PCs (a area in which BiT-tech members probably excell). All these a practical and possibel, but rather dull and hard to make a splash in the sunday papers.
Instead we have Zero-carbon this or that announced every day which in this case means:
Making computers, traveling and most other activities have a carbon cost. Better make an effort not to be wastefull and if you want to do the extra bit find you own carbon offsetting system to fund, don't claim your PC or flight was carbon-free.
however the huge problem with hydrogen is the fact that getting it uses a lot of energy (usually electrolysis) so you get the carbon released into the atmosphere at another point in the chain, and the problem remains exactly the same
If they ever get fusion working (and it runs on water) then a lot of the worlds problems will be solved for some time
Firstly fusion would give a lot of energy, without releasing "greenhouse gasses" into the atmosphere
Secondly, it could then be used to extract hydrogen from water, then vehicles and such could start to run on hydrogen
However, that's still a way off, and the world is soon going to be in crisis, whether global warming, or we run out of oil, we are soon going to be in serious trouble
....errr..... ontopic: these guys are some retards at PCworld o_0
"Save Carbon, DESTROY RAINFORESTS, YES!"
amen
Has it been *that* long that I'd been browsing here?
/me feels old.
:) That cracked me up... well they've got to have something to do there to take their minds of their wholly uninteresting night sky. ;)