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Green products: Compact, low-power PC

by Nick Smith 1st December 2006

I've just built myself a new desktop PC, with the aim of a powerful, quiet workstation that is also environmentally friendly. I don't play games on the machine, so I don't need a power-hungry 3D graphics card.

It used to be the case that a powerful CPU would need noisy fans and a massive power supply, but the heart of my new system is the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 running @ 2.4GHz, which is around 3x faster than my old Athlon 3500+ but actually uses less electricity, sipping 53W at 100% load.

Shuttle computer The case/motherboard I've gone for is the Shuttle SD32G5, which has a stylish black case and hardly takes up any room on my desk. I've fitted it with 2Gb of RAM, a Western Digital WD5000KS 500Gb hard drive, fanless PCIe graphics card and a DVD rewriter. Originally I had a 73Gb Raptor hard drive in the machine, but with everything else so quiet, the hard drive noise was driving me crazy! The Western Digital drive is far quieter - in fact you can hardly hear any system noise, even at 100% CPU load.

The final results for the full system are 83W when idle, and 115W at 100% CPU load, excluding monitor. It only uses 4W in standby (S3 mode), but this wasn't the factory setting... read more about Putting your PC to sleep.

Read more: Komplett.co.uk shop
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