Ars Technica dishes out guide for building your own green PC

By Donald Melanson | February 27, 2008

Filed under: Desktops

There’s certainly no shortage of companies out there touting their own ready-made green PCs, but if that’s not your thing, the ever-helpful folks at Ars Technica have now let loose a guide for building your own. As you might expect, there’s no shortage of compromises involved in this particular endeavor, although Ars has at least laid out a pair of different options to accommodate different needs, including a Green Gaming Box and an Extreme Green Box. All told, that former option will run you just over $1,000, with one of the biggest energy-saving trade-offs coming from the video card (a Radeon HD 3850) which, as we all know, is one of the biggest power hogs in any system. The Extreme Green Box, on the other hand, pushes things up past the $1,400 mark, and includes no-comprise options like a VIA C7 processor, integrated graphics and, of course, a 32GB SSD drive (which is obviously responsible for a huge chunk of that total cost). Needless to say, Ars thinks you’ll have to make fewer such compromises in the not too distant future, what with things like cheaper SSD drives and VIA’s low-power, high-performance Isaiah processor on the horizon.