This is how the 80 Plus certification of sources influences the electricity bill.

The 80 Plus certification body has made itself a very important niche in the industry, because despite the fact that today it is nothing more than a sort of marketing fee to be able to wear the logo of certification that does not really guarantee anything (since only two units are analyzed and the others carry the seal without being analyzed even if internal components are changed that alter their operation), they roughly indicate the efficiency of a power supply and what we can expect from it.

What is efficiency certification?

Any manufacturer who wants one of their specific power supply models to carry the 80 Plus Efficiency Certification Seal must pay a series of costly fees for the entity to test and certify the efficiency of the unit, and in depending on the result obtained. be provided with a tampon or another that will be the one they will wear. Once the seal is obtained, all units of that particular model will be able to carry the seal, despite the fact that, as we mentioned before, they have not been tested and even if they modify their internal components.

Leaving that aside, this certification serves to give us an idea of ​​how efficient the power supply is, efficiency being the difference between the power that comes to them from the wall outlet and the power it delivers to the PC. To give a short and simple example, if a power supply is 80% efficient and you get 100 watts from the wall outlet, you are actually only providing 80 watts of power to the PC, so 20 of those watts are usually wasted. in the form of heat.

As you can see in the image above, the certification consists of six levels which range from a simple 80 Plus White certificate as the lowest to 80 Plus Titanium as the best and which designates the most effective sources, by the way. through Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum levels. You should know that even if they do not bear the seal of this certification, it is forbidden to sell in Europe power supplies with an efficiency lower than 80%, which is comparable to the 80 Plus White certification, and therefore you will not find from sources less effective than that, not even OEMs of dubious provenance.

Now, is an 80 Plus Gold font better than a font that doesn’t have any type of seal? Surely yes, but it is also possible that the non-stamped font maker simply did not want to pay the expensive toll that the entity demands in exchange for being able to use its logo. In any case, and leaving that aside, it is clear that the more efficient the power supply, the less energy will be wasted and therefore less energy the PC will needlessly consume.

Here’s how 80 Plus sources influence your electricity bill

First of all, you should know that whatever type of power supply you have, the PC has a certain consumption, that is to say that because it has a more efficient source, the PC will not consume Not less. What you will be able to reduce is wasted energy, and for you to understand this in a simple way, we will give an example:

Imagine a PC that needs 500W of power to run, and that’s what the power supply should provide.

• If we use an 80 Plus Silver source, which has a full load efficiency of 85%, it actually consumes 588 watts from the outlet.
• If instead we used an 80 Plus Platinum source, which has an efficiency at 100% load of 89%, the actual consumption would be 561 watts.
• If, on the other hand, you have an 80 Plus White source with an efficiency of 80%, the actual consumption would be 625 watts.

You can see the difference, right? Although the consumption of the PC is always 500 watts, the power that the source needs to feed it to the PC differs according to its efficiency, and this is where we notice that the source is more or less efficient. , since ultimately this difference in consumption It has a significant impact on the electricity bill. And since you’re probably wondering how much this influences, we’ll clarify this below.

We are going to assume a gaming PC equipped with a fairly powerful graphics card and a latest generation CPU; the consumption of this in-game PC is 450 watts, but since you don’t play all the time, we estimate a average consumption of 300 watts while it is on. Also suppose the PC stays on average 8 hours a daybecause it is used a lot.

The actual consumption we pay is measured in kWh (kilowatts per hour), and to calculate it you have to divide the consumption in watts by 1000 and then multiply it by the hours of use. With the assumptions we made for you, and taking into account that the average price per kWh in Europe in June 2021 is 0.14 $ / kWh, we can draw the following conclusions (cost calculation over a month of 30 days) :

Here we can clearly see that there is a monthly saving which can be quite large because if, for example, you switch from an OEM 80 Plus White font to an 80 Plus Titanium font, the difference to what you would pay. is 1.55 euro per month, and that amount would be significantly increased if the PC consumed more than the 300 watts on average that we estimated.

If we had to say which efficiency certification is the most recommended, we will undoubtedly tell you that 80 Plus Gold is the one that has the best value for the cost of the source itself (which can be found at prices completely acceptable) and the difference in energy cost compared to previous certifications.

For example, imagine you are planning to spend $ 80 for an 80 Plus Gold power supply for your PC, and you currently have an OEM. If your PC is similar to the one we used in our calculations, it would be talking about the monthly energy savings of 1.04 dollars per month, so that in 77 months (about 6.5 years) you would have amortized the investment. Many of you will say that then it doesn’t pay off, but remember the heat generated due to the inefficiency of the source and what it would cost you to buy an OEM source of the same wattage (calculate that even the cheapest will cost you 30 dollars), so that in this case the breakeven point would be found in just 4 years.

Of course, the final decision is up to you, but now you have empirical numbers to be able to get a feel for it.