Here is an article with straightforward, DIY advice about building a computer that is likely to be greener than the box you are using to view this page right now.

The article goes through an analyzes performance and power consumption on a component by component basis. And while energy is an important concern, it is not the only one. We're well aware of the number of toxic materials that make up our computers and electronics, and those materials also enter into consideration.

A couple of the biggest steps are replacing the CRT (and disposing of it responsibly) with an LCD monitor both for energy and materials reasons and installing an efficient power supply.

The 80 Plus program is a voluntary certification system for power-supply manufacturers. The term "80 Plus" is a little complicated, so bear with me for a moment. If a PSU meets the certification, it will use only the power it needs at a given load: In other words, it won't use more power than it needs. For example, if your PC requires only 20 percent of the total power of a 500-watt PSU, the system will consume no more than 100 watts. Only when the PC requires full power will the PSU run at the full wattage load.

It's a little like that highly efficient furnace in your home: Instead of just operating at full capacity, an efficient furnace will throttle itself to heat your house using as little power as possible, with no overheating. Older furnaces just push out constant heat to keep you warm in December.

An 80 Plus power supply can save about 85 kilowatt-hours per PC, per year. In many ways, it's the heart of a green PC, since it manages the power for all the other components. It also has the most dramatic effect on your energy bill. Of course, all 80 Plus power supplies are also lead-free and RoHS (European Return of Hazardous Substances)-compliant.

A new, green PC is also likely to be more powerful than your current computer, since the most current, leading-edge components are also the greenest. The example PC and monitor draw a combined 168 watts in normal peak operating conditions. This is 48 watts for the LCD monitor and 120 watts for the PC, of which 65 watts is for the Intel processor.

You may (especially if you're a geek) have different choices about the components you would use in your computer. Let's leave those cats vs. dogs debates to other forums. Mostly it's exciting to see people taking into account efficiency and toxics at all, something that was unheard of a couple years ago.

article: Extremetech Build a Green PC via: Ramsay Home

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The freedom to choose
written by fak3r , April 14, 2007

This has long interested me, and I think it displays the power to choose when it's time to pickout a system. If you're happy with a Dell, do research and don't buy more computer than you need (not easy to do). But the real geek in me loves to order/build systems by hand, and this is how my server runs at home. It's been online for 5 years now, it's a 1.2Gig Athlon, however even once I had picked out the parts and got it running, there was more work to do. Over the years I've pulled everything out of it that wasn't needed; cd rom, floppy, fast video card (I have an old, old card in it now, there's no GUI on it, so vid is only needed for console, or really just for boot), as well as extra case fans. Yeah, I didn't want it to run hot, so I took out all the tabs in the back (the parts that cover the slots when you don't have a PCI card in place for example) and took off the front plastic cover on the front, allowing for more breathing space. Then it's on to the BIOS. I have a board that allows for 'overclocking', but of course it'll do the opposite. I've stepped it down to 900Mhz, then I disabled everything not needed; parallel port, usb and so on. There's always more system level power settings that you can set for things like harddrive (which is a big issue) before you set to work on the OS. As for the OS I run FreeBSD, with only what's needed to run installed; and again, no gui. There are other power saving factors in the OS (ACPI, PowerScaling), even though Linux likely has even more options here.

I've been looking to build a Tivo replacement with the MythTV app, however figuring out how to do it as 'green' as possible is my first consideration. I'll blog about it and see how low we can get things. Unfortunately something that does so much can't be run off of a 200Mhz ARM proc, but we'll do the best we can. Once we have some solar panels powering things I'll feel even better!

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