How The New 80 Plus Ruby PSU Rating Compares To Titanium, Platinum, And Gold

Move over, 80 Plus Titanium, there's a new boss in town, and her name is Ruby. CLEARresult, the entity handling the well-known 80 Plus power supply certification program, has unveiled 80 Plus Ruby, its top-end badge aimed at super-efficient server power supplies.

80 Plus Titanium already demanded over 90% efficiency at 10% to 100% delivery of the rated wattage, but Ruby expands the spec in two fronts. Not only does it demand 96.5% efficiency at 50% load, it introduces a fresh new requirement for 5% load, at 90% efficieny. The table below outlines the requirements for US consumer 115V, EU consumer 230V, 270V/480V AC-to-DC, and 380V DC power supply types.


According to CLEAResult, this new requirement and the spec itself are squarely aimed at curtailing datacenter wastage. A total usage of only 5% means a mostly-idle server, and given the bursty nature of some inferencing AI workloads, it makes sense the new spec ensures no good watt goes unused. In the company's own words, 80 Plus Ruby fits the bill "when servers operate in redundant configurations or are unintentionally over-sized for their applications." The entity also state that while datacenters currently account for 0.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption (an estimate that seems low to us), it predicts that the figure will rise to between 6.7% and 12% come 2028.


There's no telling if or when the spec will cover standard PC desktop power supplies. On the one hand, Titanium-rated units command a premium as they are, and the recent price uncertainty with tariff poker will probably drive them upwards still. On the other, the quest for electrical efficiency won't stop anytime soon, and the advances in the past decade alone have been quite impressive, as 80 Plus Gold units are cheap and plentiful these days. It's not unthinkable that we'll see a Ruby-badged unit in a PC build recommendation guide a few years down the road.