Well apart from the fact that the efficency has rather little influence on what a power supply can provide what I meant with this is that their for example is a "500 watt" power supply from LC Power where those "500 watt" - well they are no lie but the way they came to this number doesn't work in reality. That's also the reason why the guys at planet3dnow (at least I think it was there) don't really like those PSUs anymore because they ran tests for years and yet again they prove that this PSU literally "explodes" when delivering 400 watts. That's what I meant with this - vendors not only trick with the rails but also are a bit generous with their wattage specs - at last for some of those cheap PSUs...
haha, that reminds me of the power supply i put in my friends system. I built him a computer, and he liked glowy things so on newegg i found a "550 watt" psu..... that glowed and had like huge led lit fans in it. I figured, hey, cool looking and had good cooling potential. probably about 2 months later he heard a pop, smelled smoke, and couldnt get anything to work, so we got newegg to give us a different psu, and he tore the fans out of the old one just to put in his pc. luckily no hardware was damaged, and it was one of the few times i didnt read the reviews before i purchased a part (was under the impression that 550 watts was 550 watts) if i had read the reviews, everyone (without exception) had it go within either 2weeks 3 months or 6months. It was odd because at that time i had redone my computer which has a dual core processor, two nvidia 8500's in it 1 harddrive and 3 dvd burners in it and it was running off my old 360watt psu that was in the previous incarnation of my computer. Ran like a gem for 6 months until my friends psu broke and we both got new psu's together. Probably still would have worked for a while longer, so it really goes to show that sometimes numbers can like, and a low watt good psu can sometimes rip a high watt cpu with low quality in half.
