Unfortunatly, the power saving benefits are negligible or non-existent with modern monitors, with only CRT (The Big Old Computer Monitors) showing any difference at all, in fact for LCD panels the energy use acturally goes up.
Instead lower the refresh rate of your monitor
from
techlogg.comThe refresh rate is the speed at which the monitor updates the image on the screen so many times per second. On CRT monitors, this is quite critical because drop the refresh rate too low and you start noticing that annoying flicker.
We found in testing that by using Blackle, power consumption dropped on our 17-inch Mitsubishi DV1770 test monitor from 72.5W to 65.4W. By way of comparison, we retested the same monitor on Google but dropped the refresh rate of the 1024x768-pixel display from 85Hz to 75Hz and found the power consumption dropped accordingly from 72.5W down to 67.9W.
We then tested our 15-inch LG StudioWorks 570LE LCD monitor but instead of a power rise when going from Google to Blackle, we found that we were able to gain a small reduction in power consumption by dropping the refresh rate from 85Hz to 60Hz. In this test, power consumption dropped from 26.4W to 26.2W, certainly not much of a drop, but at least it wasn’t a rise as we found when using Blackle instead of Google.
While refresh rate is critical to comfortable use of CRT monitors, it’s far less critical for everyday use of LCD monitors so if you want to reduce the already low power consumption of your PC LCD monitor, ensure that the refresh rate is as low as possible. Most LCD monitors typically allow 60 or 75Hz, settings allowed for by our other test monitor, an LG L192WS 19-inch widescreen model.
While using Blackle saw a rise in this LCD monitor’s power consumption as well, dropping the refresh rate from 75 to 60Hz saw power consumption on Google fall from 24.9W to 24.5W.
