*made quote smaller so post uses less room.
So i have 1 S5 plugged into a 1300w supernova power supply and the other plugged into a 1600w supernova
S5 plugged into 1300w supernova: pulls 603w
S5 plugged into 1600 titanium rated superova: pulls 585w
box fan at full speed: 150w
using a titanium rated power supply is sooo not worth it. only saving me 18w? lol
Part of it is your using a quality PSU all the EVGA supernova's are high quality. If you compared it to a cheap brand I would guess difference would be bigger. Not all brands are equal on quality.
I am surprised it was only 18 watts though. I would have not bet on that being difference.
I don't think anybody should be surprised by an 18W difference at a power draw of 600W. That's about a 3% difference. The differences between Gold/Platinum/Tinanium/etc aren't really all that large. The basic Wikipedia entry shows only a 4% difference: See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80_PlusSo if you have a high quality Gold that beats it's numbers by a bit, then you have a 3% difference. The big jump was from Bronze to gold. When you are at 92% efficiency, there isn't a lot left.
One other small item. There isn't anything that says the two S5's are identical in terms of their actual power draw.If you switched the S5's between the power supplies, you might a larger or smaller difference.
I think Crypto is in general correct that the differences between an EVGA Gold and an EVGA
are probably not worth the price, strictly in terms of efficiency. There may be other improvement such as cabling an wire thickness, though I don't really know.
I wonder if PSU manufacturers test and rate and grade their power supplies like an ASIC vendor would. Might a Gold power supply be a Titanium that didn't quite make the grade for Titanium after it's manufactured? Wouldn't be hard to put a different label on it at the end.
