Help Buying New Battery Backup

Hello,

I am going to resurrect this:


In my house we have surge protector units on the major electronic hubs (basically my pc room and the downstairs TV room).  These are the APC or Belkin $30ish units with like 10 plugs.  Mainly use these for addition protection but really as a lot more plugs to use.

I also had a whole house surge protector installed by an electrician last fall.  I did this mainly to add a 1st line defense to my house.  I also got a rebate on the service and it helps with the house insurance.


For the most part, I was under the impression that my PC is protected from power outage damage....mostly.  The power lines are underground and used to never go out, but lately PECO has had an issue with power in my area and we have had several outages  (like about 8-9) in the past 3 months.  For the most part I am gaming or doing my fantasy football and so its not like I lost hours of work time.

I would need maybe 5-10 min to shut everything down without scrambling around like a chicken with no head.  Even that is a luxury.

So my question is......would a UPS help my PSU to live longer?  Thats my main reason to get one is to have that protection to be able to shut down correctly.  Since I have dropped considerable cash into this PC over the last 1.5 years.....I'd like it to live a while.  I am still under DS warranty but I do not think they cover "Acts of God", nor would I stoop to trick them if they did not.


I have a 1000W corsair power supply, and only would be adding the PC and monitor (so i can see what i am doing) to the UPS, and would only need 10 min max.  I have read that you need at least your watt max, but I would assume the correct way is to get a meter and record what the items draw and get +10-15% over that.

But what ballpark of a UPS size are we talking here , and thats even IF I need this thing.  again...the sudden loss of power is annoying when gaming, but if no damage is being done to the system, I can live with the occasional outage.  what I want to avoid is damage to my PC from these random and now recent, outages.


Thanks

As I mentioned your psu has good protections itself.

If you look at your corsair's specs you will see:

Over Current/Voltage/Power Protection, Under Voltage Protection and Short Circuit Protection provide maximum component safety

most good psus can protect themselves and its best if you plug them directly to the wall.

So if the psu dies in a surge, its not an act of god that killed it, act of god is like a tree falling on it, and you would be right that is not covered, however a power surge is not an act of god, its an act of pepco, and the psu is suppose to protect itself, so its covered by the manufacturer, which is why I stress manufacturer warranty that surpass DS warranty for the psu.

but having an ups won't hurt, its good to have time to shut things down properly.

Edited by DST4ME - 15 Jul 2011 at 2:34pm

My pleasure and good luck

Besure to put the pc under full stress (both cpu/gpus) and then check your power draw.

Thats not gonna do it. those are not heavy on the cpu and gpu, maybe you got the gpu.

Do this, down load fah tracker from below, I have it all set:

Fah tracker for testing

Do not run anything else other then av and etc that is suppose to run in the background, fah puts a heavy load on the cpu and gpus so you don't want to be running anything else on them.

Disable sli in the nvidia control panel first.

just download it, unzip it to a a folder, once done, open that folder and you should see another folder in it called "fah tracker v2" open that folder and then click on "FAH GPU Tracker V2.exe"

Now the fah tracker will open, do this:



once all the clients you can have all turn green, then check and see what your pull is.

for those of checking for temps, after the client goes green let it run for 30 minutes and see what your temps are.

remember smp will stress the cpu and the gpu clients will stress the gpus, so check the temps accordingly.

if you have 2 gpus, you need to run 2 gpu clients, for this you need to have sli disabled, and connect another dvi cable to the second card, or the second card won't be detected.

ATI cards can't fold, so we can't test ati gpus with this.

Edited by DST4ME - 28 Jul 2011 at 1:19pm

I would recommend that whatever UPS unit you buy, it can output power as a pure sine wave (also sometimes listed as a true sine wave). Many cheaper devices only produce what's marketed as a "simulated sine wave", which can be a modified, square, stepped, or approximated sine wave.

Although historically most decent PC PSUs are fairly robust and can handle most types of simulated sine wave outputs, it's all of the other peripherals like monitors, printers, or even Plasma/LCD TVs (there have been horror stories about those and non-pure sine wave outputting UPSes) I'd be concerned about.

The APC unit DST4ME listed is a very good one, it's a business-grade unit. I can vouch for APC, we have their Smart-UPS and Symmetra (a 10-year-old 16kVA unit a new 40kVA unit) products in use where I work.


Edited by lukexcom - 18 Jul 2011 at 9:53am

Let me know what your power draw is with the fah app. I'd love to know.

Take your time, whenever you have a chance is fine, and I appreciate it.

so I tried to run the Fah GPU Tracker but I ran into some issues.

Does it only work for Nvidia cards? because it would not auto detect my card. I have a HIS HD 6970. I did find that the settings to use for that I believe are ati 700 or 800. also, I only have 1 card so do i set it at 1 gpu3?


Either way I could not get a green go light as in your instructions, and almost all the options to start or stop a client were greyed out.


I tried to find out what was going on but the program kept saying that my video card was unsupported and that the drivers were out of date....yet I have the 11.6 ones from the amd site and that is the newest set they will hand me.


So...I could not give you a valid wattage today.


If you want to estimate here is what I have:

Its a Haf 932 case
i7 920 at 3.65 ghz
1 series 320 160gb ssd
1 WD non-caviar black 1TB HDD
1 his iceq 6970 (and for a card that is supposed to be cold when running it seems warmer than the hd 5850 I had)
1000 watt corsair psu
a regular cd burner
a noctua d12 cpu cooler
a creative titanium or whatever soundcard.

i run eset av and webroot spysweeper. i have just a few other programs on my pc.

I am a little under the weather today and at home so if this mesage is not sounding correctly, well i am blaming the medicine.