Power efficient?

[MitchDD]

Hi! I just wanna ask the expert opinions of enthusiasts about the power efficiency of a certain rig. Please indulge if my ignorance leads the way. I'm not familiar about electronics. If you buy a mid-range or high end board, high end graphic card and a high end processor (thus having a higher power requirement) and install them with a gold certified power supply, does your rig consume less power (amount of power drawn from the wall socket) on the process? I'm confused about this. Thanks for any reply.

[mavroxur]

The efficency of the power supply makes a difference. There's your cheap-o average power supplies, and then there are 80 Plus certified power supplies. They come in different levels. There's 80 Plus, and then bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and titanium levels of 80 Plus that denote different efficency levels. Check this link for more details -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_PLUS

As far as the efficency of the components, there's not a lot of flexibility there. A graphics card will consume a set number of watts at idle and under load for the particular core. They don't offer different efficiencies of the same card (the exception being when a GPU is made under two different processes. Now, of course, performance per watt gets better with every generation of hardware (e.g. a GTX280 will be a lot slower than a 550ti, but the 550ti consumes less power). Same goes for processors. Newer architectures are more efficient per watt than older architectures.