3w led vs led chip

So im looking for lighting for my new tank build and i want to go with leds and what i want to know what is the difference between your standard 3w led and a led chip like the one in ecoxotic stunner strips?

 

Power. There is a HUGE difference in output and spectrum from quality 3w leds like cree and even the lower quality 3w leds. 1w leds like the ones in stunner strips don't come close to producing the amount of light that a cree can.

 

Well, I'd like to bring up what was an argument a few years ago with LEDs. You must have 3W LEDs to be able to keep coral. Then fixtures running 3W LEDs at 1W came out and now multichip LEDs with LEDs ran at 1W each are popular. The lower the power an LED uses out of its maximum rating, the more efficient it is.

Stunner strips run the LEDs in them at .25W however. If they were ran at 1W, they would be just about as good as the LED multichips which use dozens of 1W LED dies to combine into a bright light. They are only .25W though, and even though they may be outputting a reasonable number of lumens, they are not enough unless you get dozens of strips. Yes, they could keep coral if you had a lot of them, but it's not economical or really possible to fit enough in an area.

Spectrum of these chips are probably quite tightly controlled because of the advertised spectrum that Ecoxotic gives. The LED chips are probably not very accurate but the ones that are go into the strip to fill the various color requirements.

The LEDs in a stunner strip are multiple low wattage chips because they are likely more efficient than one would expect, but also cheap because of their nonbranded nature. They also are only meant to do what they are called, Stunner Strips, bringing out extra colors or accenting light, not providing the main source.

In any case, you probably will not find a light meant for keeping coral without 1W LEDs. The chinese fixtures use 3W or 1W chips and multichips use the same. Underdriving a 3W LED such as a Cree XP-G to 1/4 of a watt is possible, and will still be highly efficient.

TL;DR
The difference between the LED in a stunner strip and a 3W LED such as a Luxeon or Cree LED is the current they're designed to run at, and how efficient they are at maximum output. The efficiency difference may be large or small, but when driving a 3W LED at a low power, it will be more efficient than driven at 3W. Depending on the rating of the LED in the Stunner strip for instance, likely a 5050, they are probably quite efficient due to the low drive current as well. The output range may not be as high as a modern day Cree or Luxeon, but they may be close to the output of the models of years past.

For example, a random model on Alibaba outputs 30-35 Lm at .5W, so 60-70 Lm/W which is around the level of Luxeons in the Solaris fixtures. More efficient ones probably exist as well.
Another one is 90-100lm/W linked here. If Ecoxotic uses the best available 5050 LED chips, they could be less than 20% lower than the output of a 3W Cree chip at 3W, but at 1W, they Cree chip is much higher, however, 6 Cree chips are much more expensive than the 5050 chip which can be ran at a lower power for higher efficiency, and as such, they use them.

TL;DR TL;DR
Good quality ones are a little bit less efficient, but much cheaper than 3W chips. Similar in output to some of the LEDs in chinese fixtures.

 

Thank you for the good reply that really helps me out to understand what I should look for but I am on a budget and what would think about something like http://www.aquatraders.com/EVO-Quad-48-LED-Reef-Bright-TR-p/56263.htm or do you know of a fixture I should be looking at that can cover 48" for a reasonable price?

I know its not the cree leds but it is a 3w led

 

While that light may be able to keep some coral, I wouldn't personally go for it due to the color ratio and low quality of the product.

If you can go for a bit more, in the 300 dollar range, 2 of the chinese D120 lights from Evergrow would be very nice, and allow manual dimming to get the color you want. The manufacturer also is very responsive with quick replies to emails and assistance with broken parts. You can also decide which LED and the color of them to get custom ratios. These are found on Aliexpress.

Reefbreeders also sells these lights for a little bit more, but provides much faster support based in the USA. The downside is you cannot choose the color ratio of the light.

There may be other options from sponsors, but the cheapest I saw was Reefbreeders.

 

There is some evidence that 1W are actually more efficient than 3W LEDs. It gets really tough to figure all of this out, as the manufactures list statistics in lumens, which is really only a measure of Green/Yellow light. For our hobby, blue light is generally regarded as more important, so, it's tough to say if an increase in green/yellow light, also means an increase of blue light. Heck, maybe there is the same light output, but more is yellow, then less would have to be blue, so, in that case, higher lumens would actually be bad... I don't know it seems that there are a lot of statistics floating around the net, but not much consideration of the meaning or relevance.

Anyways, rant over LOL. I think that the big benefit though to having more wattage, in a single chip, is that even if you loose some efficiency, you can cram more chips into a given area, greatly increasing the total potential output. I do think that lower wattage LEDs, just don't pack the same punch. But this isn't because they are necessarily "less efficient", it is because you can't fit enough of them in a fixture. To get enough output, your fixture would need to be gigantic.