Greeeeen.....

This is an article i wrote for a gaming and tech magazine,which one of my friends is releasing soon..

Green Computing

Electricity is primarily produced by the burning of fossil fuels.This leads to large emissions of CO2, which is one of the greatest causes of global warming.Now what the hell is all this doing in a gaming magazine??

Let me introduce you to a concept called Green Computing or the Green PC.Green Computing is an effort by engineers and scientists world over to make computers which are energy efficient,eliminate the use of hazardous material and promote the idea of recyclability.

Firstly,I won't keep drooling about the ill effects of global warming, because you have to be living on the moon to not know about it.

Secondly,hundreds of crores of money are invested by our government to provide electricity at subsidized rates.So if every single one of us puts a check on excessive power consumption, we could make a large contribution to our economy.

Still not enough incentive? Well, then maybe you would do it for yourself.Here's a simple example on how low power consumption can significantly cut costs.

A 17 inch LCD monitor uses 20 Watts as compared to 72 Watts by a 17 inch CRT monitor.Suppose you use your PC for 6 hours a day,simple math would tell you that a LCD monitor would consume 43.8 kWh a year as compared to 157.6 kWh by a CRT monitor.Assuming that the cost of electricity is Rs 4/kWh a CRT monitor would cost you Rs 630 while a LCD monitor would cost you Rs 175 per year.The rate of electricity for commercial purposes is almost double that for domestic purposes.You could easily recover the cost of your LCD monitor over a span of 5 years solely because of it's reduced power consumption.This example also gives you an idea of how useful it would be to turn off your monitor if you are listening to music or downloading.

That was one element of your desktop.Similarly, the Asus P5Q Pro Motherboard uses EPU(Energy Processing Unit)technology and has been tested to save 40 Watts more than a Gigabyte EP45 UD3P motherboard and Intel's Atom processor has an energy consumption of 20 Watts as compared 75 Watts for a Pentium 4 based processor.This time I leave the math to you.

These energy efficient monitors, motherboards,processors and even hard disks have a similar costs and deliver similar performance to the ones you use currently.So next time you assemble a PC,remember that a little bit of research won't cost you,the govt. or Mother Earth!