Today, I wanted to touch some on low-impact computing. Not so much from a ’saving the world one PC at a time’ perspective, rather from the more common, practical cost savings side of things. In the past, I admired such projects as FreeGeek and Zonbu both provide various means at low-impact computing for the masses. Each with its own practical benefits in play.

So this got me thinking - what if water cooling my existing PC could cut down on both noise and perhaps even some of the electricity usage, when properly applied? After looking into it, I really could not see a whole lot of benefit outside of possible noise reduction. If I was truly looking at saving costs with the PC itself, it would mean a different PSU (power supply), tweaking my CPU settings (voltage anyone?) among other hassles.

So this brings me to the Desktop Multiplier, which frankly would be very cool in my own home as I know for a fact that short of running Parallels on occasion, I am not using nearly all of the PC’s resources with a single user on one machine. It’s definitely something to consider in educational environments, as it creates a substantially lighter energy footprint than running a gaggle of workstations simultaneously. Think traditional thin clients, without the extra boxes.

With the exception of needing access to a fully fledged stand alone PC for occasional benchmarking, the Desktop Multiplier just makes sense to me, especially when considering the number of PCs running in my house at the same time with multiple users.

[tags]multiple PCs, Linux, low-impact living[/tags]