Saving power by changing computing habits and hardware
 

I have decided to make some changes in my computer system. For one, I own 3 computers that more or less stay on continuously (laptop and 2 desktops). I have started letting my main computer go to sleep when I leave it idle for more then 30 minutes. That computer alone uses up between 400W and 500W of electricity. My laptop uses 65W when it's plugged in and the second desktop uses around 200W. Both desktops now go to sleep when inactive for more then 30 minutes and my laptop I unplug whenever I'm not using it and I close the lid. This helped pretty significantly, however, since I'm on the computer a lot, my desktop doesn't sleep very much and if it's not sleeping, it's not saving. So I have been trying to use my laptop as much as possible to help keep my desktop asleep unless I absolutely need to use it for say, music or movies (I like watching movies on the big LCD screen it has). But that still isn't enough for me.

I'm currently in the process of building a new computer. It will not entirely replace my main desktop, but it will be a desktop that I can use when I want to do anything but play video games. I am using hardware that, in total, should use less then 60W of power and then on top of that I'm building a super efficient operating system to put on it (the operating system is something like Windows XP or Vista for those who don't know) that is based on the "Linux" operating system. My goal is to design a computer system that can be extremely reliable, power efficient and easy to use that I can use for personal use as well as provide to people looking for similar things.

If anyone here has experience with Linux or computers in general and would be interested in being a part of this, please let me know. I'm working on the operating system side right now, trying to strip it as much as possible and get it working well enough that it passes the relative test (giving it to my mom and seeing if she can use it).

Why not turn the computers off while not using them?

yup
 

Don't forget to use a black background on your desktop... that'll save 5 watts on mine.

I'm interested in a good graphics card that has low power requirements and uses a heat sink instead of a huge fan. I was gonna try and build a low power quiet one to replace the one I built years ago but it was way cheaper/faster/easier to buy, so that's what I did the other week. Night and day difference on the sound level. My power consumption (w/o monitor) dropped from 135 watts to 45 watts. Only downside might be the integrated graphics. The front has a "green" 19" CRT which runs around 70 watts. I'm not sure how much lower an LCD would be but I want to hold one until the 24s start to tank in price.

I thought mine was a steal... $400 for a 1.6ghz / 2 GB ram / Vista / 320 GB 7200 rpm, DVD burner Lenovo. Even has a remote which isn't as useless as I though it would be. It's an odd looking duck with a weird blinking eye in the middle that as far as I can tell fakes whether the knob around the eye is set to be on performance (red), economy (green) or auto (blue). The watt meter shows no real difference.

Nets out at $400 at Tiger Direct in Canada, but about $730 US...

If you want help with the Linux aspect, I have been using Linux (and OpenBSD) solely for over six years now - no windows at all on my computers. I am a junior developer for Gentoo and have contributed to many projects. I have used several apps for measuring power from hardware down to the applications, on my laptop, to maximize battery life. So just let me know if you want help, I may be able to offer something.

I did some tests with the kill-a-watt meter, and LCD's don't care as much about background color, I didn't however check on brightness, also with the LCD that I tests, when the computer turns off or goes to sleep and the screen turns it's self off, the little light on the front is the only part that is really on... the kill-a-watt meter showed near zero.
if you are building a computer from the ground up, under clocking the proceser will help alot if you can afford to do that, that is one way that laptops use less power is by taking what would normaly be seen as a fast chip, and slowing it down, because the more you ask a chip to do, the hotter it gets and they can only handle so much heat, so if you want to make a faster chip you have to make it more efficent... simaler to aerodinamics, you can go faster with improved aerodinamics!
look for a computer with fewer fans, some of the mini desk top computers, I think the mac mini is one of them, don't have a cpu fan because the cpu is slow enough that it runs cooler, fans use power, and in the end need a bigger power suply, so you need a fan on that too! of course computers are kind of like cars, their speed is a selling point, even if you don't need it.

One of the best ways to build a power saving desktop is to buy one of the Via x86 processors. Via x86 processors also have some power saving mother boards that Intel and AMD lack. Of course if you are using Linux then you need not restrict yourself to x86, but you have to know what you are doing.

That's what I'm doing. I'm using a complete VIA setup. The chip is a VIA C7 <1Ghz processor and it has an 80W PSU that I'm pretty confident I won't even really stress since I'm also using a CF memory card from a digital camera as my hard drive to minimize heat and power consumption.

GenKreton: I will definitely be in touch with you about doing some testing and suggestions. If you care to do so, PM me your email address so we don't have to divert the topic of this thread with our technical garble.

You may have better ways of dropping Carbon emissions for your dollar than going with an entirely new setup. Post the specs on your other two rigs, depending on what they are you may be able to drop 'em to C7 consumption levels, give or take 10-30W w/o spending much, if anything at all.

My main desktop:

Intel Core2 Duo E4300 @ 3Ghz
2GB RAM
4 hard drives
500W power supply

Pentium III backup machine (running on that right now)
P3 733mhz
256MB RAM
1 30GB hard drive
150W power supply

I'm really just building the VIA computer because I've always loved how small they were and I hate how loud my main desktop computer. I'm thinking of salvaging the hard drives from the main computer and putting them in the P3 machine, since it doesn't use that much power, to just host the files like a network share. Then I'm building the VIA machine since the only thing I don't like about the P3 is how slow it is, so the VIA at 1.5Ghz will give me an extra boost in that area and keep power consumption low.

I just love how small the VIA computers are though. The idea of having a desktop computer that was smaller then my computer monitor is always an idea I liked for some strange reason.

The C7 will be about as fast as your PIII give or take. It's slower than my Sempron 3000+@1ghz/.9V in everything except for CPU MD5 (hardinfo benchmark) and uses the same power more or less. I'm betting that w/ a m-atx/onboard video the Sempron 3000+ rig would use the same or less power since it only uses about 10W more than my C7 system, all things being equal. What 1.5ghz C7 are you getting? Also, what kinds of use/users do your rigs see? That's just as important as anything else IMO.

My media computer uses an AMD Geode NX1750 cpu that I underclocked one step down from normal speed and it runs fanless now. 1gb of ram, 8gb compact flash card for the hard drive. I am also using a fanless video card. That computer is dead silent since I took the fans out of the 200W power supply that powers it. With no fans in an aluminum case it barely gets warm when using the dvb card to play hdtv feeds. The dvb card actually gets warmer than the rest of the computer combined. The video card is I think directx7 or 8 only. Doing normal stuff has no need for graphic accelerators so don't worry about the video card specs other than power consumption.

So find a good low powered setup and use a compact flash card for the drive, or a 4200rpm laptop drive if you want low power and silent running. If you are using it for browsing and email only configure the browser cache to not write to the drive and use compact flash. It uses a lot less power and is solid state so silent. Keep the flash under half full so wear leveling can keep it lasting a really long time.

For the most part, I usually just web-surf, word process, chat and program on my computers. I went through a phase of overclocking which is why I have the Core2...that and for games. But I don't really have time / play games anymore that much so it's more or less just dead weight except for the hard drives.

I basically just want a really really small, really really quiet, really really efficient machine. I don't care so much if it's a C7 or an AMD or Intel, I just don't know if I can make an mATX machine as small as a C7 machine.

Also, I will be running linux on the C7 if I get it so, really, processing power isn't an issue. I have on the P3 that I'm running on currently, installed Ubuntu 7.10 and I did a lot of clean up and hacking away at processes to get it to run on about 60MB of RAM and installs just under 2 GB on the hard drive (not including swap). That's not bad considering it started it's life at a 4GB install and 256MB minimum requirements.

My only complaint is that programs like firefox and movies are very choppy. I think this is mainly CPU related since I see the CPU spike to 100% when opening either firefox or playing a youtube movie...will the C7 be better at these things or will I see similar performance?

I don't know why you couldn't make a matx system small, just get the right sized case or build your own? Someone on the Gentoo forums pointed out that a PCI/AGP video card uses more than onboard, so I tested it and w/o a PCI video card my underclocked/undervolted Sempron rig uses the same as my C7 rig. The C7 handles most videos and firefox pretty well, so maybe the lag of your PIII system is because of the video card/drivers, or because it's using swap...

Your choices really depend on how much you want to/can do, and what you want. The C7 is fine for most in terms of web/mail/video/etc and ya don't need to do anything to see low power consumption figures, but it's not very fast. Other systems of similar pricing can be dropped down to the C7's power consumption figures w/ faster processing power/64 bit capability as well as provide more processing power at the cost of more power on demand if ya don't mind having to configure more stuff. Why not use a killawatt to see what you can do with your Core 2 Duo system via undervolting&underclocking/using onboard video/one hard disk first? You may be able to get it to the point where, with a matx board and passive heat sink, it'll use as much as a C7 system. In terms of networked file sharing why not just use WOL to turn on a machine if you want to access it's data? No use in having three or four hard disks and a whole machine idle when most of the time you won't need access to the data.

My laptop is a 1.4ghz first generation Centrino. I can set the processor speed as low as 600 MHz to save battery life, and a few settings in between as well as automatically adjusting it for me. Anyways, when I force it to operate at a constant 600 MHz, flash videos can be choppy during playback, but at 1.4 GHz they are fine. Since RAM, programs, et. al. do not change, this definitely means 600 MHz is the limiting factor. I'm going to go out on a limb and say your Via C7 shouldn't experience any problems playing flash videos, but as we all know, there is no substitute for testing :p

yea, well, like I said, I'm going to get it regardless because I just think they are so neat with their size and all. If I find it does what I need it to well enough, then I'll probably end up either selling the Core 2 or at least moving the case somewhere out of the way and only turn it on when I need it and live mostly off the VIA system. I have a feeling it will work just fine. I have been working on this P3 now for almost a week and my only complaint is the load time for firefox and that flash videos are lagging a bit. But I have been monitoring my system usage the whole time and RAM usage has never spiked above 150MB out of the 256MB installed so that's not the limit. The graphics card is only an 8MB GeForce card from forever ago so that might be it. I have a newer card I can swap into it to see. Otherwise it's probably the processor. The C7 is somewhere between 1.0 and 1.5Ghz (can't really find any specs for exactly what) but it has a FSB speed of 800mhz so it's at least that fast, probably faster though which should be more then enough for basic usage. I also think the idea of a completely silent, fanless computer is neat, I've always wanted one of those :D.

I've got 2 PCs on most of the time. One dedicated Linux box, an older P3 700MHz business machine. It does go into hibernate and the monitor shuts down. The other is used by everyone in the house, and is a dual boot machine. It is also a gaming machine with dual vidcards... I use a fan controller to run the fans faster when gaming, and all but off when idle or in hibernate.

I'm considering one of the new Ultra Mobile PCs whcih are just small laptops. I would love to carry one for GPS and music and photo storage in the Jeep and while camping, batter charging would be with solar panel...

Computers sucking the power from your life!
 

Well a little dramatic. I have 4 laptops 2 tablets and 4 tower PC's. I'm an IT and I work with computers all the time what I've found that helps with saving on the elctric bill is that instead of turning your laptops or portable computers off put them in standby if you plan on using them again within say about 2 weeks because it takes a toll on your computer as well as your electric bill if you repeatedly turn them back on. I have my laptops each setup for whatever task I think best suits each one. Like for instance I have one that is completely dedicated to iTunes and loading my iPod because everyone who has one and pretty much everyone does know that unless you have a boat load of money just lying around to build a really awesome PC then when you are going through music and loading songs the PC really can't do mush else like if you want to surf the net or play games watch movies, etc.. I don't load it down with anything but the basics and I put almost everything on my external hard drives( you can get terabit hard drives really cheap nowadays) that keeps your computer from ahving to work so hard and if your computer crashes then you don't have to worry so much about losing all that data. Also your computer doesn't have to search through all that extra stuff to get to what you are looking for which will also save time and energy(yours and your computers).

I have a 17" MacBook Pro laptop. The screen is beautiful and the sleep mode is fantastic.

It really was an expensive computer, but I was looking for something pretty high end for graphics design and video editing.

I was pleasanly suprised by the power-saving features of the computer. The OS is pretty smart about dimming the monitor, sleeping the hard disc, etc.


All that talk about small, powerfriendly computers is interesting. The electric motor controller in my motorcycle is an Alltrax AXE. It has a 9-pin COM port for communicating to a computer.

If I had an energy efficient computer built into my not-yet-created electric car, I could use the computer to monitor amps, volts, etc of the motor.
The software has super-simple minimum requirements other than it must run Windows and have a COM port.

Is there anyway you can get software that runs on Linux or, even better, BSD? You can run them, especially BSD, on machines so crappy that a windows GUI has never booted on. As the jokes go, NetBSD runs on everything including your toaster (it has run on toasters).

The information for Alltrax's software is HERE
It is a very small, fast-loading program. I think it must use hardly any memory.

It lists several Windows OS's, including 98.

What kind of computer setup do you think would be best to run this inside an electric car?

For any kind of vehicle application I always recommend using the mini-ITX form factor systems. They aren't the cheapest you can get, but they are super power efficient. The one I'm looking at getting is the ARTiGO Pico-ITX kit that sells for about $350USD. The only kicker is that it's coming from over seas so the shipping to the US is $98 for 5 days air which kind of hurts so I'm still considering going with a parted together system from newegg.com. Theses systems, however, if used with a solid state compact flash card as the hard drive (they make up to 32GB cards that sell for less then $100) they can consume less then 40W of power, often times even as few as 10W or less when idle.

The Pico-ITX kit doesn't have a COM port, but it comes with everything you need right out of the box which is a great bonus since parts for these systems can be hard to find or expensive if you do find them. But it has USB ports and I know they make USB-COM port adapters (at least I'm pretty sure they do).

I like the ITX format, and even considered building a system for my Jeep. But by the time I fatored in the cost of a decent touchscreen LCD, I was well over the cost of decent used laptops.

Which is why I am interested in the new, smaller format laptops like the Asus EEE-PC. But because I want more storage, the coming Everex Cloudbook and others are more with what I want. Having something to "tank" my photos on while traveling would be nice. As well as having all my MP3s with me. Adding a USB GPS receiver to the unit would be great. AND, I can move the systme from car to car, or even a rental if need be.

I thought I would share this link. http://www.linutop.com/linutop2/index.en.html

This computer uses about 8 watts.

Now that is cool...

I found this to be a bit interesting: http://www.goodcleantech.com/2008/02...lowpower_p.php

Hmm... I think sometimes people miss the point. Yes, going with another AMD/Intel/Via system would double the power consumption, but with a $230 premium it'll take at least six years to see any savings in cost, and more importantly IMO, that $230 could do so much more in other arenas. Like an e-bike conversion, or lay down fridge, or etc... The point being that going for the minimum in one area probably isn't the best way to save energy in genral. Going for the overall minimum compared to the dollar spent is where it's at.

I suppose That doesn't jive with the whole "green" economy, but I guess I'll never see slightly reducing the amount of plastic used by bottled water companies as green when we could just use tap water. I suppose that's the difference between "green" as a fashion statement and "green" as in green. :thumbup:

The point I think with the Pico-ITX system is if you are looking for a new computer, these are pretty inexpensive compared to comparable other ITX or ATX systems. Also note, that, if you are even the slightest bit computer savvy, you can install and use Ubuntu Linux which is the best distribution out right now in my opinion. In 6 years, you would probably have to upgrade your computer at least twice to keep up with just the windows operating system's, system requirements, however, I can almost guarantee that if you are using ubuntu, you will never need more system then you started with, even if you upgrade to the new release every 8 months. So keeping that system running for 6 years would not be completely un-realistic. Yea, you wouldn't see the savings for that much time, but still, 6 years to break even is better then never breaking even with another "less expensive" system.

Back in October or November, Everex offered a Via ITX machine at Walmart with Gos Linux. A desktop for a mere $199. Even though the machine was placed in a much larger case than needed, it sold out in mere days... I'm not sure of its power requirements though. But yes, it is possible to offer low power consumption systmes. I'd like to see more companies offereing these. Again, this is why I am leaning towards the Ultra Mobile PCs like the Asus and Everex tiny laptops.

And of course, I say this despite my gaming system with SLI and a 550 watt power supply. At least I have a LCD screeen to help reduce.

I do use CFL lights in my house, except in areas that they're "off" colors disturb me, I just seem to be real sensitive to that. I have tried some replacements for flood lams, and all have failed in hours. I want to try LED bulbs as they come down in price. All in attempts to save me money more than be "green". If I can do both, so much the better.

I second the EEEPC, minimalist computing at its best. Hopefully the next generation will come with the Diamondville chip (2W TDP), a 9" screen, and the same form factor/price. What else could you need? :)

- Lost Cause

I can't find the link right now... But someoen DID want more for his EEEPC... He added internally, Bluetooth, SD cards for more stroage, GPS, and a ton of other things too. I'll see if I can find it must be on my PC @ work...

I've actually been really looking into a Nokia n810 for most of my uses and a light desktop for everything else. The n810 comes with sd card slots, gps, bluetooth, and other jazz.

There was a discussion today about this same topic over at Slashdot primarily linking to an article on Ars.

I saw that on my RSS reader this morning, good article. Makes some very valid points and again re-affirms what was mentioned earlier that it's really not economical to just up and change your computer for the sake of saving electricity. However, I still hold that if you are looking for a new computer anyway, this is something that should be considered.

Not really... You can buy something out of the box and ready to use (uses twice as much power), so no need to to buy disk/CF storage, or ram, or etc... For $60 less than what that barebones kit costs. So even if you went with something totally premade, versus this, you would still need to spend one or two hundred bucks extra to have a functional system.
Over the same time frame, don't you think that something like this will drop in price, or something even better will pop up, far before the six years are up? I think we would still be better off, at least from the perspective of reducing Carbon emissions, if we threw together something for a third or quarter of the price that use twice as much power, because we would still have two or three hundred bucks left over to reduce Carbon emissions via some other avenue, which, so long as we haven't exhausted all the other measures we could take to reduce use/increase efficiency, could go a lot farther than saving 20W when the computer is on.