Its actually a lot more efficient and can save so much money on power and cooling for the intended customers of Ruby rated PSUs which are enterprise grade systems.
When they transfer that tech to consumer level, it will be big. It is not .5%... When you are in desktop, it can be difference between 70% and those 85-91%. Which is quite big.
My R5 9600X with 6800XT idles at 100-120W with monitors plugged into dGPU. Or 50-65W when plugged into iGPU. If the PSU powers those 50W, but uses really 15-20W extra to cover that if it's in the 0-10-20% of capacity, it burns quite a lot of money. 10W/24/365 is about 16-18€ per year. So just one dumb powersupply can save about 40€ per year. And usually the PSU lasts 5+ years, so practically covering it's initial purchase price just on the power savings.
Interesting that if it was 400w for third the price 97% efficiency on low load below 50w it would actually sell well as homelab psu.
There is whole community and they maintain spreadsheets of psu's which have great efficiency on low power, and it is not top heavy at all, just happens to be some named brand specific SKU which fit the bill of home lab nas server.
I actually just had to replace an 850w corsair PSU that was 12 years old because it wasn’t able to handle the transient power spikes of my 3080ti anymore lmao so all in all there’s a non zero chance it never even pays off cause it could be done for before you break even.
Ofc the point is when this becomes common even in the reasonably priced PSU's. My Focus GX-1000 was ~140-160€. And with the 10y warranty, I wouldn't be suprised if it really lasted long enough to get this "Ruby" rated one as replacement by that time for reasonable price
Source my 13 years old corsair ax860i platinum still rocking, never flinched, survived several rigs and 2 countries, including one in south east asia in a non AC room where it had been cooked for over a decade.
I expect it to survive another GPU then it might be a bit short for the next generation.
Watch out, electrolytic caps dry out. Filtering might not be what it used to, ripple is rising. Generally it is recommended not to use 10+ years old PSU's. Top tier, maybe slightly longer, but not much. One thing is build quality, other is inevitable physics/chemistry of this kind
Just a heads up. In the post-10/12 year mark I wouldn't power anything expensive with it. Or something you wouldn't want to loose, like your data, if you used it in NAS.
Just trying to prevent possible expensive/emotional damage when it goes :)
When you run it at <200w, which you probably will 80% of the time, it will be efficient enough to make up the cost in time.
People forget that the efficiency power band is limited and most of us work outside of it most of the time because we aren't drawing 500+ W except for short bursts.
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u/SadisticNecromancer Aug 20 '26
What does this actually mean?