How green is your pc?

[1 REP MAX]

Spoiler:

The end is nigh. Ice caps are melting, polar bears are being forced to beg for coins outside bus stations and everyone is moving to the Midwest as coastal areas shrink and temperatures soar. Good god, we’re doomed. OK, so global warming scaremongers occasionally get carried away with stories about our impending demise, but even the most delusional flat-earthers can no longer deny it. Things are definitely heating up.
Homo sapiens have been farting obscene amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, but what’s that got to do with you and me? After all, incinerating zombies in Half-Life 2 is hardly the same as incinerating lumps of rainforest. Or is it? The more electricity you use, the more guys in a factory somewhere burn stuff. Research shows that home entertainment gizmos are hefty contributors to all that carbon. What’s more, gaming PCs are the SUVs of home technology. A single graphics card can consume about 145 watts, and many high-end PCs run two cards at the same time. Plus of course, there’s additional drainage from high-end processors, hard drives, fans and peripherals.


Fiona Gatt, editor of the VIA Arena website, recently ran an experiment using a PC with an AMD FX55, 2.41GHz processor and an ATI X1900 GT graphics card. A Thermaltake power supply displayed the total wattage for each PC activity. Email drew 175W, Windows Movie Player drew 188W, but at the top of the pile were two games: Call of Duty (292W to 334W) and Blazing Angels (240W to 338W).
Combine these findings with the fact that many of us leave our machines on almost 24/7, consuming around 150 watts when we’re nowhere near them, and PC gamers might as well drive to the ice caps and start a bonfire with baby seals. Our sister mag, PC ZONE’s hardware editor Phil Wand says: “Most people don’t have a clue about being energy efficient, least of all when it comes to luxury items.”


Above: "Let's get out there and stab some trees!"
Nicholas Carr, author of the book Does IT Matter, agrees. “There are plenty of leisure activities, from reading to kicking a football to having sex, that leave far smaller carbon footprints (than gaming). If the choice is between playing World of Warcraft and flying a private jet, you’re going to use less energy playing the game. But for most people, that’s not the trade-off.”


Carr recently estimated the electricity consumption of the average Second Life citizen by combining an individual’s PC usage with SL’s power grid. It translated into 1.17 tons of CO2 production per virtual citizen per year - the equivalent of driving an SUV for 2,300 miles. “Gamers should be concerned about this, just as they should be concerned about other ways they consume energy. But I don’t think they need to feel guilty about it,” Carr reassures us. Much of the responsibility lies at the feet of the games industry itself, especially MMOG hosts. A 2007 survey entitled “Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World” revealed that online servers account for 1.2% of all power consumption in the US and 0.8% worldwide.


“Blizzard is rumored to have 500 servers for World of Warcraft alone,” says Wand. “Add in all the other titles, all the other genres, add in the games-mad Koreans, then consider that a fully occupied server will be using more power than a color TV, and you have some serious power slurping going on. And that’s before you consider the millions of people actually playing the games at the other end.” Philip Rosedale, head of Second Life’s Linden Lab, is all too aware of his vast power needs. He recently announced during a podcast: “We’re running at full power all the time, so we consume an enormous amount of electrical power in co-location facilities (where they house their 4,000 servers)… We’re running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we’ve got machines in.”


But Linden Lab also insist that their watts/CPU ratio has been reduced over the years. “MMOG companies have a big incentive to reduce their energy use, as electricity represents one of the biggest costs of running a data center,” explains Carr. “But I think it’s fair to say that, as with other data center operators, some games companies are smarter than others when it comes to minimizing electricity consumption.” Is Second Life ‘ecologically sustainable’? Perhaps. It’s still rubbish though. Of course, the games industry pales in significance to the likes of Google - which is rumored to sport hundreds of thousands of servers - but energy saving and other environmental concerns are becoming priorities for every successful company. “As much as 30% of energy in the UK is wasted, costing businesses millions each year,” says Joanna Bacon, PR for the Carbon Trust group.


Surprisingly, Valve, Ubisoft and EA all declined to provide feedback for this article. Blizzard “won’t be able to comment on this,” while ELSPA - the body representing the British computer and videogame industry - is “unable to comment… As it’s not something that we have full information on.” As we know, recycling is a big part of environmentalism, and the industry is dead-set against second-hand game sales. Could this be the reason behind the silence? Perhaps downloadable content is the route to reducing energy consumption. Only Valve can tell.


Some PC component and peripheral creators are making moves to shrink their carbon footprint. Creating a 24kg PC with a monitor requires at least 240kg of fossil fuels to provide the energy. Add water and chemicals, and your friendly neighborhood desktop has consumed the weight of a car in resources before it even leaves the factory. While this state of affairs is mostly ignored, a few tentative steps are being taken in some quarters. A Swedish company called Swedx sell wooden mice, keyboards and displays, all sourced from ecologically managed forests in China. Local Cooling is free downloadable software that optimizes a PC’s power savings, and Dell has announced two new “green” servers that have been tweaked for performance per watt.
Gamers can also green their PCs by buying energy-saving components, but the information is often misleading. Wand points out: “Almost all PCs now come with ‘Energy Star’ stickers, but the requirements for being considered green and part of the program haven’t changed since 1992.” Perhaps the answer can be found at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at MIT, where scientists have isolated a wacky spinach extract that could power our PCs within the next ten years. If world leaders screw it up, only Popeye can save us from sizzling temperatures, enforced encampment in the Midwest and polar bear tramps.

Big turn off
You don’t have to be a tree-hugging Earth mother to realize that turning off your PC, when it’s not being used, is a fine idea. If you must leave your computer on overnight - to download from the Internet or back-up data – then at least turn off your monitor.
Death to screensavers
Fish in a tank? 3D pipes? Waste of time and money, dude. In the UK, up to 8% of domestic electricity is consumed by devices left in standby mode. Screensavers are big energy hogs - and they’re useless,” confirms IT expert Nicholas Carr.


Stay cool
Local Cooling, a free application for Windows XP, sticks a middle finger up to global warming by providing a greater degree of control over XP’s power modes and various system components. Saves on your electric bills, as well as the planet.

http://www.gamesradar.com/gb/pc/game...04101138811081

[jayc]

Thats the reason I now run a laptop (uses no more than 55 watts) and have a NAS running 24/7 which uses 15 watts.

What they really need to look at are some of the bigger plasma/lcd screens. My mates 50" one uses 1.3kw, now thats a serious amount of power. So much so that I reckon this summer if he wants to watch a lot of TV he will most liekly have to invest in air con because the room will be too hot! I think the manufactures should put an ebnergy scale on these like they do for washing machines.