Question Dell Going Cheap on Power Supplies, Now?

Just because they've chosen to go with a Gold rated unit rather than a Platinum rated one, which seems unusual and expensive for a prebuilt box anyhow since they generally go as cheap as they can get away with, unless it's a very high end workstation of some kind, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a step backwards. There are plenty of Gold rated units out there that are much better quality than plenty of Platinum rated units.

The efficiency rating has very little to do with internal build quality or reliability, and is almost entirely ONLY a measure of efficiency in regard to how much energy pulled from the wall gets wasted compared to how much gets used.

The difference is somewhat negligible anyhow. And from one model to the next it's not just likely but a certainty that you'll see different models of power supply in use even on the same generation of machine.
 
Dell's power supplies have been fairly decent one built by Delta. Could be that they need to drop from platinum to gold due to parts shortages, though.

And while build quality does vary, to actually get gold, or especially platinum, efficiency does usually require above average parts.
 
No, it really doesn't. Usually companies WILL use better parts, in the past, when designing for that kind of efficiency, but we've seen TONS of units from companies like Apevia, Raidmax and others with Gold or Platinum efficiency that were piles of crap. Even some from EVGA and other top name brands. And while Dell USED to be very conscientious about putting at least a moderately decent OEM style PSU into their prebuilts I think it's a trend that they've definitely gotten away from over the last few years in order to try and increase profit margins because I haven't seen any especially good units in their boxes for a while now and have participated in many threads over the past two or three years involving recent Dell machines that came with pure junk in them.
 

Joseph_138

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I only mentioned it because I am wondering now how they are powering their in house versions of the RTX 3060Ti and 3070. They both require a single 8-pin, so that would mean using an adapter to turn the 2x6-pin connectors into a single 8-pin. You didn't have to do that before when they included 1x6-pin and 1x6+2 pin.