Why you should have 80 Plus Gold PSU

[mralexkohl1993]

I recently got my new Corsair HX850 watt psu. I had a crappy Raidmax i had from a budget build and i have a watt meter. By just upgrading it droped how much i pull from the wall at full load by 60+ watts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhbT1ibTlsA in that video i show you the difference.

I also share my system specs in the video.

[Toby]

I'm guessing it has more to do with the PSU model than the 80+ rating. Granted, 80+ gold PSUs are probably going to be higher quality, but still...I wonder what the difference would've been if you compared a Silencer MKIII rather than an unidentified "crappy Raidmax".

[ZeVo]

Yeah, I agree with Toby. The reason you probably saw that much of a difference was because the quality of the PSU. Never heard of Raidmax. 80 GOLD probably does help a little, but unless you have your computer on 24/7, you won't see a big difference.

[Boosted_i6]

Regardless of the rating, just goes to show how important it is to buy a good power supply

[Guest]

I'll try and dig it up unless someone beats me to it but there isn't a huge jump between bronze, silver, gold and platinum power supplies in terms of savings each year - somewhere between a few cents and $1-2.

Anyway, never heard of RaidMax and I doubt many others have either. So imma just go with you've now got a quality PSU vs potential fireworks...

[mralexkohl1993]

all i was stating is that their is a difference between bronze and gold. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152042 thats the other PSU

[Toby]

all i was stating is that their is a difference between bronze and gold. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152042 thats the other PSU

Yeah, apparently that's nowhere on par. No one's disputing there's a difference between bronze and gold, but your thread title has ensured you'll get a lot of people arguing with you, because the difference you highlighted is much more a case of "why you should have a decent PSU", rather than "have an 80 Plus Gold PSU".

[star102]

The gold certification means that more than 80 prercent that you draw from the wall is actually being converted in electricity. And it is not all about the certification, you should look at the max ripple and some other values if you want a really high end psu.

[christoi]

I'm seriously doubting the 80+ Bronze certification of that unit, such a deviation is too large to be true, even with capacitor aging in consideration. The fact that it's made by Andyson makes more skeptical, given then are known for labeling units with false wattage numbers. With an actually decent unit, the difference in efficiency is usually 5% at most, nowhere near the 15% difference that you saw - especially considering the fact that you went with a higher wattage unit which should decrease efficiency.

[wpirobotbuilder]

Depending on the wattage of your power supply, you can save some money over the life of the PSU. For 20/50/100% loads, bronze has 82/85/82% efficiency, while gold has 87/90/87% efficiency. If your computer draws 500W from a 1000W PSU, you pull 33 fewer watts from the wall with a gold PSU over a bronze, which can be a decent amount of money depending on your usage and electricity prices (like if you game 8 hours a day running in California where electricity is 15 cents/kWh, you save approximately $15 per year. Over the lifetime of the PSU (lets say 5 years), that's $75 in savings. It's not much, but it's something.

In addition, savings scale linearly with usage and wattage. If you draw 1000 watts from the PSU 8 hours a day, that's $30 per year. If you use it 12 hours a day instead of 8, you save $23 per year. Depending on your situation, you can spend less in the long run with a higher rated 80+ PSU.

In the same situation, a platinum PSU will save you about $5 more per year. So while it may not be worth it to upgrade from bronze to platinum, gold might be worth it

[christoi]

Depending on the wattage of your power supply, you can save some money over the life of the PSU. For 20/50/100% loads, bronze has 82/85/82% efficiency, while gold has 87/90/87% efficiency. If your computer draws 500W from a 1000W PSU, you pull 33 fewer watts from the wall with a gold PSU over a bronze, which can be a decent amount of money depending on your usage and electricity prices (like if you game 8 hours a day running in California where electricity is 15 cents/kWh, you save approximately $15 per year. Over the lifetime of the PSU (lets say 5 years), that's $75 in savings. It's not much, but it's something.

In addition, savings scale linearly with usage and wattage. If you draw 1000 watts from the PSU 8 hours a day, that's $30 per year. If you use it 12 hours a day instead of 8, you save $23 per year. Depending on your situation, you can spend less in the long run with a higher rated 80+ PSU.

In the same situation, a platinum PSU will save you about $5 more per year. So while it may not be worth it to upgrade from bronze to platinum, gold might be worth it

That's assuming a lot though, really. I wouldn't think that most people would be running their systems at high load levels for so long every day, so the costs could easily be half, or even lower than that (especially since most people are running single card setups, which would only pull around 300w at gaming/rendering load).

Personally I recommend gold units because of the reliability, I'd expect a higher quality unit to easily last over 10 years under reasonable load.

[Dim]

I run entirely on solar panels, so how much power my PSU draws is really quite negligible to me :P

[Umeshwarnath]

I run entirely on solar panels, so how much power my PSU draws is really quite negligible to me :P

almost no carbon foot print!! nice.......are you pro go green? should have cost you a lot to rig it up(the panels)?

[Umeshwarnath]

WOW !!! didn't know it made that big a difference!! (note to self : buy only 80+ gold psu for next build.)

[wpirobotbuilder]

Depending on the wattage of your power supply, you can save some money over the life of the PSU. For 20/50/100% loads, bronze has 82/85/82% efficiency, while gold has 87/90/87% efficiency. If your computer draws 500W from a 1000W PSU, you pull 33 fewer watts from the wall with a gold PSU over a bronze, which can be a decent amount of money depending on your usage and electricity prices (like if you game 8 hours a day running in California where electricity is 15 cents/kWh, you save approximately $15 per year. Over the lifetime of the PSU (lets say 5 years), that's $75 in savings. It's not much, but it's something.

In addition, savings scale linearly with usage and wattage. If you draw 1000 watts from the PSU 8 hours a day, that's $30 per year. If you use it 12 hours a day instead of 8, you save $23 per year. Depending on your situation, you can spend less in the long run with a higher rated 80+ PSU.

In the same situation, a platinum PSU will save you about $5 more per year. So while it may not be worth it to upgrade from bronze to platinum, gold might be worth it

Of course, but it's not unreasonable given the OCers and higher end enthusiasts out there. Unless the computer is left on 24/7 with a relatively high idle (100+ watts), you won't really save much money. Reliability is certainly a good factor, plus they run much cooler and quieter due to reduced heat output

[MooseParade]

When you're talking about the rating of a PSU, the difference between 80+, 80+ Silver, 80+ Gold and 80+ Platinum is the efficiency of the PSU at 20%, 50%, 80% and 100% load levels. The higher the rating the more efficient the PSU will be in delivering energy. For instance, 80+ PSU's must stay within 79.1-80.9% efficiency while 80+ Platinum PSU's must stay within 89.1-90.9% efficiency.

So to make a long story short, a higher rated 80+ PSU will effectively draw less power from the wall and create less heat because it is more efficient at converting and delivering energy.

Edit: Good post, it's good to get this information out.