For most of the 20-some years that home PCs have been around, any improvements to computer hardware meant more power consumption. Every new generation of CPUs, GPUs, and motherboard chipsets required more power. Until this decade, the increases were small enough that a particular sized power supply might last two or three generations of hardware. From the turn of the millennium to early this year, power supply needs for an upper end system increased about 100 watts per year, more so with multiple video cards. But over the past year, the buzz word in the PC hardware industry has been “green”. CPUs and GPUs are now designed to sip power rather than gulp it. Most motherboards are now designed with power saving hardware and software.
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Source: OCIA.net