Make Your PC Use Less Energy

Step 1: Windows Energy Saving Features

Windows has built in features to save energy

Go to the control panel, and click “Power Options.” Select a power saving power plan. Then go to “Choose When to turn off the display.” My personal preference is to turn off the display after five minutes idle, and sleep after ten minutes.

Step 2: Physically Reducing Power Consumption

Downlclocking your components reduces the speed at which they operate, but will also reduce power consumption and head production. You can downclock your video card with software like ATItool and EVGA precision tool. Contrary to it’s name, ATItool also works on nVidia cards.

ATItool
http://www.techpowerup.com/atitool/

EVGA precision (for evga cards only)
http://www.evga.com/PRecision/

Step 3: CPU Power Features

Both Intel and AMD CPU’s have power saving features that downclock your CPU when it is not under load. AMD had Cool n Quiet, and Intel has Enhanced Speedstep. These features will need to be enabled in your bios, and with windows xp, the latest AMD drivers have to be installed for Cool n Quiet to work

http://support.amd.com/us/Pages/drivers.aspx

You can check if these features are working with a free program called cpu-z

Step 4: Other

Lower the brightness on your monitor when it is dark out.

Buy an 80+ certified power supply. These guarantee 80 percent efficiency at many load levels.

Here’s a simple one: Don’t leave your computer on when you’re not using it!

There are other green components you can buy such as hard drives.

The new HD 4890 video cards automatically downclock themselves when they idle, and use significantly less power than the 4870 and 4850 do on idle.

You can permanently downlclock your cpu, but i don’t know how to do that. You can also lower the core voltage of your cpu, but if you do not lower the multiplier/fsb along with it, it will probably not be very stable.