Ultra Efficient PSU's

Chernabog

Chernabog

Chernabog

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Joined
23 Oct 2006
Posts
3
Hi,

I've pledged to save on some electricity and as I have two computers running for many hours a day (being used for homework and research), I thought one of the best ways to save a fair chunk would be to ensure they were running as efficiently as possible.

Neither have particularily hungry components (see specs below), but I will probably be overclocking mine to squeeze more life out of it.

I do game on mine but the majority of the time spent on them is just office type activites, surfing the web, excel and word. Basically both pc's need to be running as efficeintly as possible for at least the next three years.

My pc
Intel E4300 (stock)
Gigabyte P35 ATX Mboard
2 GB DDR2 (basic 6400 geil stuff, stock)
Gainward Nvidea 8800 GT (stock)
2 x 160 GB maxtor drives (RAID)
1 x 80 GB maxtor drive
1 x cd/dvd read/write (Toshiba)
480 watt Antex PSU (about 5 years old now)
Running XP Pro 32 bit

The wifes pc
AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000+ (stock)
Asus Micro ATX Mboard (an nvidea chipset)
2 GB DDR2 (basic corsiar stuff, stock)
ATI Radeon 3600 (stock)
2 x 160 DB maxtor drives (RAID)
1 x cd/dvd read/write (Gigabyte)
350 watt generic PSU (again at least 5 years old)
Running Vista Premium 64 bit

Thanks :)

C.
 
You've created some conflicting aims for yourself there.

Your old PSUs will be running fairly inefficiently, but buying new ones isn't really going to solve anything. If it's money you're trying to save then you'll spend more replacing them with new, efficient ones than you'll save in electricity used. If it's the planet you're trying to save then the environmental impact of throwing away two old but working PSUs and replacing them with two newly-made ones is likely to outweigh the benefit of the electricity saved.

There's another smaller conflict too, namely that any electricity savings you make by using more efficient PSUs on old PCs are going to be lost if you start overclocking those PCs, as overclocking will make them use more electricity!
 
Thanks for the reply :)

Yeah I was thinking the same there for a while but economically, as long as I run the new PSU's for at least three years (and probably more like five years), then they purchase to power saved ratio should balance out in the end.

With regards to throwing away the olds ones, they would be recycled (the council here is very good) but granted, there is certainly a waste in energy for the creation of the new ones in the first place and in reclycling the old ones.

Overclocking saves on purchaseing an entire new rig, although a new rig could well be more efficient, but then we are back to recycling etc, more difficult for PCB's than PSU's.

Basically I think it comes down to the amount of time I could run the two power supplies for. So perhaps, I need ultra efficient, with a good waranty to ensure that they are likely to last the distance.

Alternatevily I could wait until the ones I have die and replace them at that point ...

As they say, its not easy being green :p

C.
 
Sell the wifes pc and get her a laptop. Energy consumption will drop like a stone.

Your Antec PSU, any idea what it is exactly? It might already be one of their 80%+ efficiency ones. If not it's always worth investing in a good PSU as it'll last you through many upgrades.
 
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I'm a student :)

Although I should be writing up an ecology report on how sheep graze on heather and an essay on Mendelian Genetics ... needed a bit of time out :)

Laptop ... good idea that, she's always saying she wants a mac so maybe ... would be considerably more expensive though.

Any ideas on how much I would get for the wifes pc (i'm guessing less than £100)?

Its a True 480p ... the older one not the mark II one, so I think its less than 80% efficient. Cant even find it on the antec website anymore ...
 
It's a different approach, and will take some time setting up, but you could run two screens from the faster computer, with a keyboard and mouse tied to each one. This way the missus can use the same computer you're using. I think the most popular phrase for it is "multihead".

Alternatively you could get her a netbook. My girlfriend is very fond of mine, as she doesn't care how fast it is and likes that it's small. It'll set you back considerably less than a mac, and I think hp do a pink one.
 
JonJ678 said:
It's a different approach, and will take some time setting up, but you could run two screens from the faster computer, with a keyboard and mouse tied to each one. This way the missus can use the same computer you're using. I think the most popular phrase for it is "multihead".
Click to expand...

I don't think that works....does it?
 
No. it does not.

Multihead is just a term originally for Matrox cards, but all cards do it these days.

What you need, is something similar to what I have...

Its a small PCI card that has

1 x PS/2 Mouse port
1 x PS/2 Keyboard port
1 x VGA port
1 x 9-Pin Serial

1 x IDE
1 x RAM

and it plugs into a PCI slot on your PC and uses the power of that PC to drive a fully independant Second PC using the Motherboard & CPU etc of the first

It does allow thwe use of its own HD or to use a partition on your main PCs one.

It sounds better than it really is.
 
God knows?

I got them "Back of a lorry" yonks ago and for kicks I put 4 into a PC and did a little mini-cluster all in one Base unit for the local LUG, and it really was just one of the most useless and yet rewarding projects I have ever wasted my time on!

I will take some photos of one if you want, and put them up.
 
If you're increasing CPU voltage, overclocking uses lots of extra power. If your motherboard allows it, you could save that power by having two profiles - an overclocked one for when you're gaming, and a stock one for pootling around on the net (or maybe even an undervolted one - most CPUs will run at stock speeds with the voltage far below the default. I've reduced the CPU load voltage on my laptop from 1.2625v to 0.975v, which makes it much quieter and more efficient.)
 
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It does work. It's not very easy to set up. I called it multi-head as this was one of the more common terms searching Google turned up, I think it's derived from multi-user. Wikipedia agrees with me using the phrase, though I don't doubt that it could have been coined by matrox years ago.

It's fairly trivial to set up gnome on an nvidia card to run independent x sessions on different screens. After that you need to edit xorg.conf to consistently identify each screen with a given input device, I didn't manage to get this behaving consistently but then I haven't tried for a year or so as I'm down to one monitor now. I'm certain this was my ignorance limiting, and not the system I was working with. I'll see if I can produce a link for you.

Solution using two graphics cards: http://wiki.debian.org/Multi_Seat_Debian_HOWTO
Trying to get my head around adapting this for one graphics card, may have a play later today.
 
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Oh, no idea how to do it under windows. I'm sure it's possible, but it might take a long time and I think you'd have to write the code to do it yourself rather than play with some configuration files.

I tend to have linux one one screen, and xp running within virtual box on the other. Separate X sessions make this a bit more reliable, though I tend to use the same keyboard/mouse for both. Setting up the above would definitely be better. Under windows I'd want linux running in virtual box on the second screen, so I'm basically taking the cowardly way out and depriving windows of 3D functionality to make my life easier.

After a brief play I've concluded that it's going to take me a while to get this running, as I'll actually have to learn some things about x. Still, it's rather offtopic anyway, I'll start a thread under linux if I get it behaving itself.
 
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Quite simply if you want to cut electricity, cut down on the amount of PC's you have and how much you use them.

Point 2,
Why do you need to spend money on an expensive Mac? There are plenty of cost effective laptops more than suited to use as a second PC.

Another point, forget the naysayers, there is nothing wrong with a more efficient PSU, if you don't buy it it is still produced, so it has no impact on the environment in that manner, and the impact of a PSU being turned to waste is miniscule in comparison to running an 80% efficient PC instead of a 60% efficient.

You can make the following changes,

Your pc
Intel E4300 (stock) This could be changed in future to a 65w quad core, which means The CPU will perform more tasks more efficiently, running stock.
Gigabyte P35 ATX Mboard
2 GB DDR2 (basic 6400 geil stuff, stock)Keep it at stock.
Gainward Nvidea 8800 GT (stock) Change for a more efficient ATI 5*** series passive card IF you need decent graphics, otherwise get a mobo with onboard GPU.
2 x 160 GB maxtor drives (RAID) Get rid of these three drives and run a single Green drive or Samsung F3 type
1 x 80 GB maxtor drive
1 x cd/dvd read/write (Toshiba)
480 watt Antex PSU (about 5 years old now) Get a new efficient 400w CPU such as Corsair.

Your wifes pc Sell it and get a laptop for around £300-£400 in the January sales
 
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