Energy efficient computers!

Are fan-less PCs much more energy-efficient than 'fanned' PCs?
I've also read that LCD monitors are considerably more efficient than CRT monitors.
So, I'm thinking of getting myself an energy-efficient PC (as well switching to the Linux OS - but that's a separate issue). Can anyone give me some advice? I suspect that the initial investment for an energy-efficient PC might be higher than it would be otherwise, but I think the savings would be worth it in the long run.
So, are fanless PCs much more expensive? And LCD monitors?
Thanks in advance.

 

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mmm most psu's i know of have a built in fan even my graphics card has a built in fan... so making a pc without one would be difficult...
When you say fan-less does that mean your opting for some form of water cooling system? A Corsair HydroCool 200 costs bout £150

Anyway LCD monitor prices vary from month to month in my experience, they are and always will be more expensive than there crt counterparts. Try get one that has a decent refresh rate and a response timeless than 30ms, that should be ok i think

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What you would have to look at is why the Fans are there in the first place.
As PC's have grown up, they've been made to cycle more and more data, the more cycles being passed through a smaller and smaller chips, the more and more heat is generated.

Since it gets to a point when the heat causes instabilities through data contamination the removal of the heat was sought as the best solution to the problem, since people hadn't come up with a way of processing all the data at a low enough energy level.
(Afterall one of the holy grails was how to process large amounts of data at room temperature without need of cooling in some form.)

Well recent "Plans" have been mentioned about the ability to generate semi-conductor super computers, rather than the old fashion super-conductor ones.
(Semi-conductors being microchips in a conventional computer, rather than the large computers in secret world labs worldwide that need constant environmental controls through liquid gases.)

So you kind of know why they are there, and this is made important when you place all the chips, boards and peripherals into a box, since when they are put in a box they now have a specific volume of air surrounding them. As the temperature of each part rises, so does the ambient temperature of the box.

The ambient temperature of the box again increases the chances of instabilities, which is the main reason the fans are incorporated into the design structure. However original designs of fans and how they are mounted throughout the box and architecture, tended to not actually remove the ambient temperature air, or heat from the components.

What the original designs did was just spin fans round that took air from the components and just placed them into the box not actually resolving the problem.

This is why many modern day fan types and cooling systems look at not just pull the heat off a component into the box, but heat off the component and out of the box and replacing the boxes heat air with external air.

However the costs of this thermal engineering, is the increase in need for power which current architectures currently strive for.

For instance an old P1 100Mhz system would probably have a 230W power supply, but with the newer P4 systems your looking at 500W+ Obviously it's not possible for powerpacks to continue evolving in the amount of power needed as it causes alsorts of other potential problems from brownouts to fires. So this means a retrofit of what is needed for a fully functional PC.

An addition to all this is that Graphics cards try to do more work than they originally use to to deal with the constant demand for better graphics. Originally everything was software rendered, but software rendering was extremely CPU intensive and it meant that when you rendered something there was little else your system could do until it was finished.

The advances of graphics hardware attempts to take what was originally 100% software rendering and try to deal with it using hardware, and thats why graphics cards have their own processors to try and deal with all the complex mathematics that would of originally been routed through your CPU slowing down your entire system.

Again the problem with that is those processors as they get bigger and better to deal with more and more complex algorythms and floating point operands, increases the draw of energy and the increase in temperature.

In short:
Less fans means efficiency through the lack of energy needed, however it also lessens the amount of information that can be processed and therefore decreases cycle speeds of a processor.

So you can have a green, slow PC that can only do 2D graphics, or
a superfast energy guzzling greenhouser that can generate 3D graphics in a flash and can count faster than you can think of the top number it can climb to.

 

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Want a more energy efficient computer, I've heard of one...it's called a pen!

Seriously, LCD monitors are okay. More efficient than CRT but way more expensive and I've only seen them go to 17". Who the hell wants a 17" monitor!? But I would opt for the LCD as I could hang it on my wall.

And Linux is again more energy efficient. It requires less effort and you won't be wasting so much time sorting out all your problems. See!

 

Water-cooling is one of the alternatives I've heard of. Others include flower heat sinks, or lots of copper baffles. Anyone know anything about these? Are they clumsy & outdated, or viable alternatives? I'm goin' to have to look into it some more.
It seems that the LCD monitor would be a good (albeit expensive to begin with) investment, and I'm glad of that. I'm checking out prices, but, if I do buy one, I think I'll wait a while, coz someone has told me that they're dropping in price all the time as well.
I read in THIS article recently that: "For every watt of heat that each computer generates, it takes two watts of air conditioning to remove that heat." I consider this claim suspect. Is it an exaggeration?
Anyway, thanks for the info guys

 

Laptops and what are called "portable desktops" (powerful and large laptops) generally consume less energy than desktops and the fans are often thermally controlled and quite small. You can install thermally controlled fans which are on only when needed in desktops. I've got one in my current desktop and after observing that it didn't seem to be on very much at all, I've turned it off with no apparent problems. My power supply fans are also thermally controled and are rarely on.

 

Sounds interesting Mr. Chips, I'll look into it. Thanks.