Dell announced its energy-efficiency product strategy today, underscoring the importance of reduced power consumption as well as enhanced performance in its product design.

The company also launched an energy resource guide at www.dell.com/energy to help customers project their power needs using Dell products.

“Dell is committed to providing our customers products with the most performance per watt,” said Dell CEO Kevin Rollins. “Our energy-efficient products help customers lower cost of ownership and help meet the broader goal of protecting the environment. It’s critical that our entire industry address this important issue.”

The focus on product energy efficiency is designed to help customers decrease electricity usage and system operating cost. Customers visiting Dell’s energy resource site can view the energy-efficient features of several Dell product families and access energy calculators to help estimate power needs. A calculator for the energy-efficient Dell OptiPlex 745 desktop system launched today, and calculators for other product families will be available later this year. A separate datacenter capacity planner allows customers to “drag and drop” their desired product configuration into a virtual server rack and estimate power required to run their IT operations.

Dell’s new OptiPlex 745 features Intel Core 2 Duo processors, which help deliver up to 30 percent better performance and power savings of about 40 percent versus previous generation Intel processors. The total number of customers expected to deploy the new OptiPlex system with power-efficient Dell Energy Smart settings, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a Dell flat-panel monitor, are estimated to have the potential to save nearly $1 billion every year in energy costs worldwide compared to previous-generation systems, or avoid the equivalent emissions of removing nearly one million cars from the road. The new OptiPlex 745 also incorporates Dell’s HyperCool thermal-management technology in the chassis to ensure better reliability and quieter, cooler operation and thus less power is required for cooling the systems during operation.

Dell’s recently launched ninth-generation PowerEdge servers can lower system-level power consumption by up to 25 percent, which when combined with significant increases in performance, provides gains of up to 196 percent in performance per watt. These new PowerEdge Servers incorporate several features to help reduce power consumption. Each server is built with an Intel dual-core Xeon 5100 series processor, which is designed to significantly increase performance while reducing power requirements, as well as high efficiency power supplies and low form factor SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drives that can reduce thermal output.

All Dell Inspiron and Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision mobile workstations now ship with sleep-state enabled, following a precedent set by the company’s OptiPlex and Dell Precision desktop workstation products. This feature automatically puts the computer into a low-power “sleep” state after 15 minutes of inactivity, but allows the computer to quickly “wake-up” when needed. Sleep state enablement is a key factor of Energy Star compliance which can help reduce electricity needed to operate these systems by an estimated 70 percent.

Dell also announced that all external power supplies for its Inspiron and Latitude notebook products are designed to meet new Energy Star requirements for computer external power supplies.