Can you be a gamer and care for the environment? It’s a tough one. A
big monitor coupled with a high power CPU and graphics card is a carbon
footprint big enough to fill a size 10, and to make it worse all those
servers running World of Warcraft or Battlefield: Bad Company 2 that are doing their bit to warm up the earth too.
ASUS is tackling this problem head on, though, with its latest innovation, Dual Intelligent Processors (DIP).
As the name suggests, this involves adding two extra chips to a
motherboard, but while you might think that more silicon will raise the
power requirements, DIP is like the computer system in a modern car
engine, constantly monitoring and tweaking the power around your PC in
order to increase overall efficiency.
The upshot is that PCs with DIP fitted should run faster and consume less power than an identical system without the two chips.
TPU and EPU
The two co-processors that make up DIP have slightly different
functions. The TurboV Processing Unit (or TPU) builds on ASUS’ existing
TurboV technology in order to constantly find the fastest speed your PC
is capable of under load. It monitors temperatures while the CPU is
running flat – while you’re playing games, sayt – in order to increase
clockspeeds to their highest safe settings.
By enabling the TurboV settings in the BIOS, your motherboard will
tune itself just as capably as any hardcore overclocker. ASUS reckons
that by optimising your settings like this you can achieve a performance boost of up to 37%.
That’s gives you ultimate performance in games, but its the second chip which will salve your sensitive soul. The Energy
Processing Unit (or EPU) keeps its sibling in check by making sure that
the lowest amount of power required for the task in hand is being used.
So if you’re web browsing, for example, it’ll start throttling back the
components to conserve power.
Hook up a Dual Intelligent Processor to an energy efficient screen and you could really start doing your bit for the green gamer cause.
