Can you be a Gamer and Care for the Environment?

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.

The really neat part of the trick is that the two aren’t mutually exclusive, so the EPU can find savings even when the TPU is working to increase processing output. In stress test benchmark 3DMark, for example, ASUS reckons that the EPU can reduce power draw by almost half – it’s published a benchmark which shows the same computer pulling just 108W with EPU on compared to 194W with it off.
Hook up a Dual Intelligent Processor to an energy efficient screen and you could really start doing your bit for the green gamer cause.