Why 80 PLUS® is Irrelevant to You When Buying a PSU
 

The 80 PLUS® logo is a big seal of approval that vendors can stick on its product's packaging that slightly informed and even uninformed buyers can form some sort of instant relationship with because the concept of Platinum, Gold, and Bronze "levels" are ingrained in many consumers. Efficiency is also a concept that is much more ingrained in people than electrical principles that actually matter to the hardware being powered by a power supply. Not only that, but 80 PLUS® logos allow power supply manufacturers to ride the eco-friendly wave of late.

Now is 80 PLUS® and energy efficiency bad? No, of course not. One of the problems is the approach that ECOS has adopted leads to ridiculous competition to be the first to achieve something unique inside of this framework to keep this advertising copy fresh even if it is not true or relevant to users. The first 80 PLUS® Gold power supply! The first 80 PLUS® Gold power supply over 1000 watts! The first 80 PLUS® Platinum power supply! The first 80 PLUS® Platinum power supply that will walk the dog! You get it... Beyond the marketing issues, the 80 PLUS® program leads to some corporate behavior that we have to question. There are surely PSU retailers that are looking for ways to exploit 80 PLUS® so it can have a marketing and sales advantage. In the end, companies’ likely play and cheat the 80 PLUS® game because there is significant thinking that the 80 PLUS® badge will make more money than improving its products in other ways, if those even improve efficiency at all. And over the large consumer picture, this is likely the truth.

While, in all honesty, we don’t care that much on a professional level about PSU efficiency as much as other factors when it comes to reviewing or selecting power supplies, manufacturers have decided that for bragging rights it will target users with this approach because it is something the company can use in its marketing. Since most of these PSU companies have found it so important, we hate to find that ECOS seems to have a significant difficulty with policing its certifications. We recently added our own version of 80 PLUS® certification testing to our PSU reviews and will continue to run ECOS' 80 PLUS® certification loads in our reviews. We started doing this because of the intense corporate focus on 80 PLUS® certifications, not because we find these all that useful. If a power supply comes in that misses 80 PLUS® certification numbers by a wide margin we will fail that unit.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/...n_buying_psu/3