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it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Sur

it was exceedingly uncommon for PC's in the Pentium 4 era to ship with anything higher than a 200W PSU. Yet today it is not uncommon to hear of 850W PSU's. Sure, but today we're pushing absolutely crazy levels of performance. At the efficiency end of the spectrum, we have something like the Intel N100, which delivers something like 14x the performance of a Pentium 4 on a TDP of 6 watts. An i9-13900F might have twice the peak TDP of a Pentium 4, but it has 150x more throughput. Big PSUs are mostly driven by GPU power consumption, but it's easy to forget just how insanely performant modern GPUs are. An RTX 4090 has a TGP of 450W, which is admittedly very high, but it delivers 73 TFLOPS at single precision without sparsity. That's the same level of performance as the fastest supercomputer in the world circa 2004. It's kind of goofy that we'll often use all that performance for playing video games, but we can also do important work with that power. >A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. Of this, 85% results from emissions during manufacture and shipping I don't really buy this figure. Using standard methodologies, Dell cite a figure of 454kgCO2e for the full tower version of the Optiplex 7090, with 46.7% of those emissions created during use. For the micro form factor version, they state 267kgCO2e, with 30.8% of emissions created during use. There's absolutely a valid case for extending beyond the usual 3-4 year lifecycle, there's absolutely a valid case for buying a refurbished computer if you don't need high performance, but at some point an old computer is just e-waste and the best fate for it is responsible recycling. https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/corporate/social-impact/advancing-sustainability/climate-action/product-carbon-footprints.htm https://www.dell.com/en-us/dt/corporate/social-impact/advanc...

bombcar 3y ago
>A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. It's patently false; a desktop computer emits barely any emissions at all; maybe a tiny amount of off gassing as it heats up. The power to run the device may emit CO2 during generation, but that's a separate question and isn't from the device itself. The gist is still correct, reduce and reuse are very important overall. What I haven't really worked out (and the math would be involved and difficult) is whether all things considered running old enterprise hardware is better than buying new power-efficient hardware for the same use case. A quick cost-benefit analysis says buying new is 'better' because the energy use of the old pays for it, but that doesn't correctly account for all the cost of manufacture and if you're in a climate that mainly heats the house, you get "free heat" from the use of the older equipment.

bombcar 3y ago

>A desktop computer emits 778 kgs of CO2e annually. It's patently false; a desktop computer emits barely any emissions at all; maybe a tiny amount of off gassing as it heats up. The power to run the device may emit CO2 during generation, but that's a separate question and isn't from the device itself. The gist is still correct, reduce and reuse are very important overall. What I haven't really worked out (and the math would be involved and difficult) is whether all things considered running old enterprise hardware is better than buying new power-efficient hardware for the same use case. A quick cost-benefit analysis says buying new is 'better' because the energy use of the old pays for it, but that doesn't correctly account for all the cost of manufacture and if you're in a climate that mainly heats the house, you get "free heat" from the use of the older equipment.