Green PCs

As PCs reduce their power consumption while simultaneously packing in more powerful chipsets, Lenovo ThinkCentre A62 and Asus Eee Box emerge as the top contenders for the most energy-efficient desktops.

To start with, the Eee Box has one notable advantage that the Eee PC didn’t have at the time of release — Intel’s Atom processor. While the Eee PC had to make do with a substantially-underclocked Celeron M, the Eee Box comes out of the gate equipped with a highly optimised low-power processor, potentially improving performance, while reducing power consumption. Working on a similar logic, Lenovo claims that the Lenovo A62 is an environmental-friendly desktops, using up to 40 per cent less electricity than its ThinkCentre predecessor due to the efficiency of the new AMD 15W CPU.

Fiercely competitive pricing makes the products even more attractive. Asus has priced the Eee box at Rs 16,490 (excluding taxes) while the ThinkCentre A62 range starts at a price of Rs 18,900 and is available on Lenovo.com.

Asus scores on aesthetics. The Eee Box’s omission of a built-in optical drive, coupled with extremely low power consumption (and accordingly low heat production), produces a CPU that is a small box.

Lenovo A62 in its usual plain black chassis is easy to open and install components like PCI/PCIe expansion cards, a hard drive, or optical drives on it. The included 250GB hard drive is spacious for a business PC, and there’s room for another internal drive, or you could use one of the eight USB ports to add an external drive. All of these components, in addition to the quad-core processor, mean that this is a fairly powerful business system. It also has impressive features such as Dash 1.1, a highly touted remote management system and Express Repair that allows quick fix solutions to system corruptions.

Unlike most desktops, the Eee box has 802.11n Wi-Fi on board, along with connectors like Ethernet, an SDHC memory card slot and 4 USB ports. You need to just plug in a wireless keyboard dongle on the back, and hook the PC up to the screen using a DVI or an HDMI adaptor and get a smart, but small, media centre system. The system works well if you don’t intend to push it over the edge as the machine’s integrated graphics card can be troublesome while playing back high-quality video files.

However, Lenovo’s A62 is a value-oriented PC and with the nVidia GeForce 8400 graphics installed on this desktop, it’s a reasonably-fast device when it comes to handling 3-D graphics. Plus, it comes with a DVD player for watching movies.