Sourcing hardware means balancing priorities. For individuals there’s an obvious appeal to stylish, powerful systems; growing businesses may need to consider their budget first; while for enterprises the focus is often on a standard platform with long-term support.
No matter what size your organisation is, it’s easy to overlook the ecological credentials of a purchase. But technology choices have a huge aggregate impact, and reversing the damage may be difficult or impossible. That’s why it’s imperative to consider the environmental impact of your procurement at the outset.
Buy low-power hardware
One way to cut your carbon footprint – and energy bills – is to avoid overspecifying hardware. If you’re buying machines for business use, for example, you probably don’t need a feature-rich, energy-hungry graphics card. For tasks that do make use of GPU computing, the question becomes one of efficiency versus total power consumption: our sister site, Tom’s Hardware, recorded the total power consumption of 50 GPUs while also testing their performance to gauge how efficiently they use the power flowing into them (see ). The AMD Radeon RX 6800 achieved the
