HP announced today that they are the first in the industry to produce configurable PCs that meet the strict guidelines of the ENERGY STAR® 4.0 standards. The ENERGY STAR® 4.0 standard is the new, stringent energy-efficiency specification from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The ENERGY STAR specification for computers was introduced in September of 2004. The specifications for these very stringent tests have been changing faster than the builders can make PCs. But in this case, HP has created a handful of HP Compaq Desktop PCs that meet the ENERGY STAR criteria. HP’s current energy-efficient desktops in the dc5700 series are priced at $899 and $959 and include Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
The ENERGY STAR® 4.0 standard doesn’t target the typical home user, however. The base savings in HP’s offerings is roughly $6 to $56 per computer. That’s $0.50 to $5 saving a month on your energy bill, so a user with one PC will not benefit much. But a business of, say, 20,000 employees (each with a PC) could save $10,000 to $93,000 per month. I know many companies that could use these saving on their bottom line.
As other companies such as Nvidia, ATI, HP, Fujitsu, Intel and many others strive to create energy efficient hardware, we will only benefit in the long run from lower power consuming products.
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