Efficiency and PFC Comparison

Final Thoughts...

There's a bit of an argument in the office as to what exactly you'd need 1000Ws of PSU for. The common ground is a quad core chip, overclocked, and at least the latest generation of graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire. When physics on GPU arrives that'll be another card to add to the system and, if you've got the money to spend on all the above, you're likely to want at least a couple of hard drives, even though the space of a single disk now tops out at 1TB. Can you accept a loud PSU given that the rest of the case will have a ton of fans and hard drives whirring as well?

Vadim goes against the grain here when the Cepheus Q80 used the Galaxy DXX 1000W and we found it far nosier than anything else in the system. But it'll be extremely rare that anyone else will be able to build a competing PC in terms of noise and features, without having non-standard kit.

None of the PSUs we've looked at are perfect, even the recommended Tagan comes short by not including the 8-pin PCI-Express connectors and as stated, even the perfectly featured Enermax is "noisy", heavy and physically huge. Virtually all the tests performed extremely well with only a couple of cases dropping outside of ATX spec and the OCZ at 100 percent load falling below 80 percent efficiency.

What about buying to run at only 50 percent load? That way some, like the Seasonic, will run completely silently. There are many different ways to consider why you would want to buy a top rated PSU, but it's worthwhile comparing them against the the high loaded efficiency of cheaper, lower rated models and how much that will cost you electrically as well.