80 Plus White PSUs

80 Plus White is the original and lowest tier of the efficiency standard, certifying roughly 80% efficiency — meaning about a fifth of the power drawn from the wall is lost as heat rather than reaching your components.

What the certification is actually worth is not the efficiency figure so much as the fact that the unit has been independently tested at all. An uncertified supply has made no verified claim about anything, and that is the meaningful line to stay on the right side of.

Where a White unit fits: an office desktop, a thin client, a basic home PC with integrated graphics or a modest card, or a replacement in a machine that does not draw much.

When to step up: Bronze costs very little more and wastes less heat; Gold runs cooler and quieter again. And for any build with a current discrete graphics card, the specification that matters more than efficiency is ATX 3.0 or 3.1, which is designed for the brief power spikes those cards produce.

See Bronze and all power supplies.