The draw of energy efficient PC gear is that it could, seemingly, cut off a large chunk of your energy bill given the fact that most PC enthusiasts leave their machines on a good portion of the day, if they’re turned off at all. Unfortunately for us all we don’t know what sort of energy savings you’re bound to see.

bit-tech has run a few tests on the more commonly available energy friendly PC hardware and the results are rather interesting:

We’re going to measure the real world differences between actual performance PCs. By measuring the power at the wall socket we have a direct readout of the immediate benefit provided by changing one component to a lower-power alternative, but it’s important to combine this with the time it takes to complete a computational task – a CPU that’s 1 per cent more power efficient when video encoding but that takes 50 per cent longer than its competitor isn’t going to be beneficial. From these two variables (power use and time taken), we can work out the product’s efficiency as a factor of power use over time.

Despite energy efficient hardware costing a bit more than the regular gear there are certainly plenty of choices in order to bring your system’s total power usage down to reasonable levels.

Storage drives are getting all sorts of fine tuning for the green segment. While a single hard drive might not consume the sort of power that would change things dramatically the amount of power saved across a RAID array of such drives could be impressive.

Legit Reviews has a look at the Western Digital 2TB Caviar green and black drives one of which promises to sip power while the other goes for all out performance. Here’s a look:

The WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive might not shine in the performance benchmarks, but it does shine in other areas like power consumption, heat and noise levels. It uses 4-5 Watts less power while completing seek operations and our testing showed that it was also 6C to 9C cooler depending on the state of the drive.  This makes the Caviar Green 2 TB drive the ideal choice for energy-conscious customers or for those that are building a system in a chassis that doesn’t have good airflow.

Performance or power savings and cooler operating temperatures, decisions decisions.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is being touted as the best reason to upgrade from your old XP install clearly trumping the company’s Vista OS by quite a wide margin when it comes to user friendliness and system response.

Up until now there has been a hidden angle to the operating system, power consumption.

The company has done some optimizing with Windows 7 which sees it offering a better battery life compared to Vista, as reported by CNET, and in our own testing of the OS we saw much improved battery life compared to Windows XP.

Markedly so.

Perhaps it’s making better usage of power saving features or it’s doing more with less whatever the case is if you’re going to stick to Windows land and want to save a bit on the electric bill then the upgrade may be a little more tempting.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 has its fair share of advancements and performance improvements but one of its less fawned over attributes is the operating system’s more intelligent power management options.

CNET News has a look at how the OS operates in order to save you at least a little bit on your next electric bill:

Microsoft is also working with hardware partners during the beta of Windows 7. The company will be sharing energy-related data in an effort to resolve driver conflicts that prevent a PC from going into sleep mode.

IT professionals, meanwhile, get enhanced tools for centralized power management, including a command line program that diagnoses why a specific PC is not running efficiently by identifying problems such as driver conflicts.

Features that could lead to improved drivers down the road? Centralized power management for IT gurus? Quite nice, as for my own experience with Windows 7 it does have a large impact on battery life compared to XP lasting a good while longer overall.

Intel’s Atom CPU has all of the makings of a miracle little chip. It has carried the netbook industry on its shoulders with its “powerful-enough” processing and low-power requirements making it the perfect match for portable computers.

That should be enough for anyone but they have bigger plans. HardwareZone has a look at the Intel D945GCLF2 mini-ITX motherboard with the built-in dual-core Atom 330 CPU. Here’s a look at how it fared:

Moving on to PCMark Vantage, we directly compared the Intel D945GCLF2
against a typical Atom powered machine like the Gigabyte M912. With the
exception of the hard drive and the dual-core nature of the D945GCLF2
kit, the two systems were practically identical in hardware
configuration. As expected, the results favored the Intel D945GCLF2
system, though the 14% gap between the two in the overall PCMark suite
was actually not as huge as the differences in the other segments.

A nice computing platform for those areas where you can’t exactly fit a tower PC, or even a small form factor machine, it’s also great for the environment.

Nvidia’s Ion platform has had all of the makings of a great option for a compact and energy efficient machine, so good in fact one wondered if it’d ever see the light of day. Well wait no longer as Acer has taken the company’s design and crammed it into their AspireRevo nettop PC.

The system takes an Intel Atom CPU, prominently featured in many netbook designs, and pairs it with a chipset containing Nvidia’s somewhat capable 9400M GPU, a combination which should be able to handle most anything a normal user would throw at it. engadget has all of the press release joy:

“The Acer AspireRevo with our new NVIDIA ION GPU is so small and
powerful it’s unbelievable,” said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president of
marketing at NVIDIA. “Watch Blu-ray movies1 and HD movie trailers, or
clean up jerky, dim cell phone videos for internet streaming. This is
the perfect PC for today’s consumers.”

A slick machine which will, undoubtedly, mark the beginning of a popular new market for the Atom CPU.

Wherever in the world you happen to be tomorrow at 8:30pm, you’ll be in the midst of Earth Hour.

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

In 2009, Earth Hour is being taken to the next level, with the goal of 1 billion people switching off their lights as part of a global vote.

Participation is easy, just shut off your lights for one hour, which counts as a vote for Vote Earth. And don’t light candles — they’ve been shown to be worse for the environment than regular light bulbs.

Depending on how hard core you are, you can opt to shut down even more electronics, but the point is to make a measurable and visible show of strength before the Global Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this year. If your neighborhood takes Earth Hour it as seriously as Sydney does, then you’ll be sure to witness a noticeable change.

Source: Earth Hour

Not shutting off that PC when leaving work each day is costing Americans a pretty penny. And not just paying energy bills, there’s a considerable cost to the environment.

U.S. organizations squander $2.8 billion a year to power unused machines, emitting about 20 million tons of carbon dioxide — roughly the equivalent of 4 million cars — according to a report to be released Wednesday.

About half of 108 million office PCs in the USA are not properly shut down at night, says the 2009 PC Energy Report, produced by 1E, an energy-management software company, and the non-profit Alliance to Save Energy. The report analyzed workplace PC power consumption in the USA, United Kingdom and Germany.

Maura Judkis at U.S. News shares some compelling reasons for powering down at quitting time and tips for remembering to do so.

Source: USA Today

Where will the next big green tech idea come from? There’s a good chance you may have Uncle Sam to think. Thanks to comparatively flush R&D budgets, militaries might hold the key to an alternatively fueled future.

Deron Lovaas, a Policy Director at the U.S.-based environmental group the Natural Resources Defense Council, says military researchers have a history of spawning transformative technologies that trickle into society, including DARPAnet, the communication system of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that eventually evolved into the Internet. “What’s exciting here is potential spin-off effects,” he says. “The military can invest so much more than the private sector can. They can invest billions into substitute fuels. And they can take bigger risks.”

And we all know how DARPAnet changed the world…

Source: Time

According to the GreenFactor study conducted by firms by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe, Dell takes home the honor of being named the greenest brand among IT buyers. Among the factors considered in labeling IT wares “green” are “efficient power consumption, recyclable/reusable packaging, recycling offers for older equipment, use of non-toxic materials, or making investments in future “green” concepts such as alternative materials.”

Although other companies like IBM, HP, and Microsoft scored well among the study’s 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers across 11 countries, Dell’s recycling program resonated with IT managers and C-level tech executives.

..Global IT buyers continue to see little differentiation among the various green offerings, yet brand rankings among companies shifted somewhat with Dell at 30% moving to number one, replacing HP, which fell to number two at 26%. Similar to the July findings, no single enterprise IT brand is a clear “green” leader globally and there is little statistical difference between the leaders.

But it’s no time to sit on one’s laurels…

According to Michael Gale, president of Strategic Oxygen, “As we watch companies make financial commitments to the environment with innovation and marketing, it is interesting that the differentiation among the various brands is so small. However, given Dell’s long-term and consistent commitment to sustainability, I am not surprised to see it at the top. The challenge is going to be building differentiated value over time.”

Source: Press Release [via Treehugger]