Upgrade your PC and save money on your electricity bill

It used to be all about speed, but in today's energy-conscious, carbon-footprint-measuring society, component manufacturers are beginning to design parts that won't consume power quite as fast. With the latest news from nVidia about its new 8800GT graphics card, the 'green PC' is rapidly becoming a reality. Here are our top three energy-saving components, available now:


Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drive

Most 1 terabyte hard drives use more than 13.5 watts of power when spinning. Western Digital's GreenPower drives beat that by around 4-5 watts. This might not seem a lot, but Western Digital says this equates to reducing CO2 emissions by up to 60kg a year – the equivalent of taking your car off the road for 14 days. This might not make a huge difference to your personal carbon footprint, but if every PC in the world installed a GreenPower drive, we might just be able to hang on to this planet a little longer.

nVidia GeForce 8800GT Graphics Card

The new 8800 series card, officially announced this week, is almost as fast as an 8800GTX, yet runs cooler and consumes less power. Heat is wasted energy, so both these things contribute to less energy used overall, with only a marginal decrease in graphics processing power.

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor

The Core 2 Duo processors were built from the ground up to be energy efficient, and like the 8800GT, they also run at far cooler temperatures than their counterparts. As the processor is the 'brain' of the PC, it's the most used component, and as a result it really does pay to choose a model which will save you money (and stop you feeling guilty about marathon gaming sessions, too).