A green PC is the sum of its parts. Credit: bit-tech.net

A “green” PC isn’t really energy efficient if it consumes less electricity at the expense of performance. That’s the subject of bit-tech.net’s excellent article that tackles the green claims often made by PC component makers. By pitting various PC parts against one another, Richard Swinburne draws up a pretty good picture of how to balance energy savings without sacrificing computational power.

Take, for instance, hard drives vs. SSDs.

Surprisingly, the SSD doesn’t save us that much power either – just 2 – 3W again on top of the 5,400 – 5,900RPM drives at idle and when writing, however compared to the performance drives from Seagate and Western Digital the difference is a more considerable 7W per drive. You’re unlikely to have many SSDs unless you’re in enterprise storage, where 7W a pop (or more for 10 – 15k SAS drives) means power savings abound.

Beyond storage, a lot also hinges on the type of processor (AMD or Intel), memory, power supply and motherboard. Selecting the wrong one can not only blow the efficiency gains of the rest, but also fail to deliver the performance boost you’d expect by pumping more electricity through them. And vice versa.

It goes to show that an energy efficient — yet very capable — rig is truly the sum of its parts.