The manufacturers are tempted to reduce the amount of active materials in the devices in order to lower the material bill. However, reducing the weight of the devices directly affects the energy efficiency. In this paper, a solution to this problem is proposed for the case of synchronous wound rotor generators. The trade-off between cost and efficiency is formulated as a constrained optimization problem and solved using a Genetic Algorithm. The cost optimization of three different machines is carried out through various design approaches. The proposed approach always gives better results than the classical approach concerning the global cost of the range.