Want a fast and easy way to minimize your power profile? How about a smart power strip or an eco-friendly case from Moneual? If you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint and your electric bill, we explore how much energy you can expect to really save.

Going green is more than just a matter of being environmentally responsible. The biggest attraction to being eco-friendly is saving money. That’s why there was such a big rush to buy Honda's Insight and Toyota's Prius. Despite paying a higher entry fee, by the time you calculate operating costs over time, you're supposed to end up in the black.

In a similar way, we are starting to see a shift within the computer industry (particularly in Europe, where electricity is more expensive), as an increasingly large audience is becoming interested in “green” features. In many ways, we can trace the start of all of this to Shuttle’s XPC. The XPC’s ability to enable full-sized desktop hardware in a compact package really forced enthusiasts to compromise technologies like CrossFire and SLI in order to get that sexy little box's dimensions. The XPC did away with the gratuitous waste typical of so many enthusiast-oriented desktop configurations in the interest of space conservation (even if the components it housed used just as much power as they would in an ATX enclosure).

The industry trends towards smaller, faster, and cheaper. That's never going to change. Still, most of us aren’t interested in migrating to a nettop to save money. We still want all of the performance we come to expect from modern technology; we just want it to run cooler, quieter, and more power-friendly in the process, too.

However, there are other ways for us to reduce our carbon footprint without having to sacrifice performance when we really need. It's a well known fact that most electrical appliances draw at least some power, even when they are turned off. These “energy vampires” are easy targets for silently reducing your energy bill.

There are two ways to go about this. If you’re planning to build an entirely new system, we recently got our hands on Moneual’s Sonamu G100, which is a micro-ATX case that automatically shuts off the power to peripherals when the computer goes into a lower power state. This could help stem unnecessary power consumption from devices that don't need to stay powered-up. There are also a few "smart" power strips available, which perform the same function. If you already have a system built up and want to achieve power savings without disrupting your existing setup, one of those might be a good alternative.

The real question is whether or not it's worth paying a premium upfront for power-friendly devices that promise to pile up the savings over time. Or are these companies just guilting us into spending extra on functionality that should probably be built into true eco-friendly devices in the year 2011?