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09 July 2008
Power-saving Sheffield graduates' computers
Source: Sheffield Star, 9 July 2008
VeryPC, a company launched by three graduates from the University of Sheffield, has won the praises of Environment Secretary Hilary Benn for consuming a fraction of the power than the best known brands in the computer industry.
The Sheffield firm which was launched four years ago by a trio of Sheffield University science students, to provide a fair deal for charities, is now challenging leading PC manufacturers.
Their new manufacturing facility on the Parkwood Business Park now employs 20 people making desktop computers, workstations and servers for customers as far away as Haiti and the United States. In less than a year it has become the acknowledged champion of maximising computing muscle while minimising power consumption, picking up a sheaf of awards in the process. Now the company has set itself the ambitious target of increasing its turnover to £20 million within two years and becoming an eco-friendly household name.
Rising concern about energy costs and global warming has helped create an expanding niche that VeryPC hopes to fill.
"The techies go crazy about our machines - they love them," says 26-year-old managing director and electrical engineering product design graduate Peter Hopton.
"A year ago they would put it to the bean counters and they would say: ‘It’s not an IBM. We’ll wait for Dell, or IBM or HP to do it’. Now they’re saying: ‘We don’t care about the brand. If you can prove it works and its more energy efficient, we’ll buy it!’"
VeryPC’s origins lie in a one-man consultancy which Peter Hopton set up to provide IT advice and support to charities after he left university.
"Charities were being abused. People were ripping them off, supplying the cheapest, nastiest kit that ticked the boxes and walking away with an 80 per cent margin," he says.
Very soon he teamed up with university friend, physics and civil engineering graduate Simon Bown, 28, and younger brother Andrew Hopton, 23, a biochemistry graduate.
At first the trio – all "computer geeks" – focused on providing advice and sourcing computers that were cheaper, more efficient and tailored to clients’ needs. Then they began building computers, capitalising on their different academic backgrounds and skills to create machines which were better at fitting the customer’s bill than the mass-produced, off-the-shelf, big brand-name alternatives. It was a small step from there to turn their expertise to cutting power consumption and increasing the recyclability and sustainability of the machines they were creating.
Choosing the most energy-efficient components to create a PC is a very important first step in keeping power consumption at a minimum, according to VeryPC. The less power the components consume, the less cooling they need and the smaller – and quieter - the computer can be. Smaller computers cost less to transport, and using metal rather than plastic for cases not only means a major improvement in the recyclability of the computer, but can also help with cooling.
"We cherry-pick components, assessing their thermal properties and the power they require, use some clever programming and then tweak the machine to get rid of the last five watts," says Peter Hopton.
You can judge just how clever VeryPC's programming is as the last step on the production line is to turn off Microsoft Windows' power management system and let VeryPC's own software do the job – saving a further 10 Watts, Peter Hopton reckons.
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