Lean Green Computing Machine
There is one appliance that I always leave running and very rarely do I turn it off, my desktop computer. If I want to look up something real quick I don’t want to wait for it or another computer to boot up. This being Earth Day I decided I might find a way to reduce some of the kilowatts I burning up.
When I started looking for the computer I kept thinking about how long my netbook can run between charges. I knew that it ran on the Intel Atom processor and Solid State Drives (SSD). That gave me a jumping off point to start looking for a desktop that has both of these low voltage consuming parts. I found a few desktops with the Atom processor, but none with a SSD also. It was beginning to look like I might be able to purchase the Starship Enterprise before I would find the type of desktop I was looking for.
Before I gave up completely I went to Intel’s website to see if they mention any other manufacturers that I might have overlooked. Their site wasn’t too helpful in running down a computer maker, but it did show they were offering motherboards with the Intel Atom already onboard that they were selling to manufacturers and custom shops. Now I went to Plan B.
I found the motherboard/CPU combo I could purchase for $68.95, a small ITX case for $36.50, a 64GB SSD for $134.99 and 2GB of ram for $23.00. I could have saved little cash going with a regular hard drive, but the SSD will end saving more than the difference in the run of a year. Right now I’m not sure if I will stick with the video card on the motherboard. If I see that it’s taken too long to draw and refresh the screen I will throw one in the PCI slot on the board.
The operating system I’m going with on this machine is Ubuntu Netbook Remix distribution of Linux. This distro was tweaked for the netbooks, but I have found that it is optimized for the Intel Atom processor. The another reason I went down the Linux aisle was the software has a smaller carbon footprint than Windows. No trees are cut down to make paper for it packaging, no fuel is consumed to deliver the product or manufacture it’s disk. Simply download the free package and go.
If the calculations are correct from the energy savings calculator this new system should save more on energy cost over it’s life than it cost for the parts.
In case anyone is wanting to build a low voltage computer as a Earth Week project, here is the list of parts, prices and links tot he vendors at the bottom.
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