Energy Saving Computers

Recently our two year old computer started to make a buzzing noise...the fan in the graphics card was going out.  As time progressed, we would have occassional computer crashes and this past week we realized we needed a completley new one.  The thought occurred to me to look into ways to make it more energy efficient.  I was surprised to find out that your graphics card actually consumes as much energy to run as almost all the other components in you computer combined!  So, making sure you have one that is not a power hog is very important.  I found out that GeForce cards should be completely avoided because in almost all comparisons, they are almost double the power consumption of a Radeon card.  A handy tool that I found is: http://www.hwcompare.com - you can plug in two cards to see not only power consumption, but other specs such as price, memory, and performance.  We ended up settling on a card that was powerful enough for our needs (my husband has a side job using HD video so it needed to be somewhat powerful), but wasn't demanding too much.  It is interesting that once you get in the mind frame of conservation, all sorts of doors open for you to change your habits as well as putting your purchasing power to good use.