surge protector/UPS

kegkilla

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I live in a pretty old house that i'm sure has shit wiring. my PC is completely unprotected at the moment and I want to do something about it. are there any standout products on the market right now or is it pretty much all the same?
 

Void

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I use them all over my apartment instead of power strips because it is always nice when the power goes out and my lights stay on for awhile. I need to get one that I can turn off the beeping every 30 seconds though....

I typically stick with APC as well, but even brands like Dynex and Belkin have seemed to work just as well. The only suggestion I would have, if you can wait, is to keep watching sale ads at places like Office Depot, Best Buy, etc. Black Friday was always the best time, but I'm sure they still randomly put them on sale throughout the year. I haven't seen one this low in awhile now but I got the majority of mine on sales from like $60 marked down to $20 (for the ones I use around the house, one for your computer is going to be more due to the higher wattage typically). It is completely outrageous how much they charge for those things when not on sale. I see them all the time around 40-50% off though, so at least wait a few weeks if you can and save a few bucks.
 

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Yeah, I looked into those last year, but for $115, fuck that shit. 13 minutes at 210w? You could get some good run time out of a 13w fluorescent on that, enough to make power outages a lot more tolerable.

But it's just not worth it to have several of them around at the prices they're at.
 

brekk

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Yeah, I looked into those last year, but for $115, fuck that shit. 13 minutes at 210w?
Their only purpose is to avoid unexpected shutdowns during very short power blips, or give you time to do a safe shutdown. They aren't supposed to keep a computer running for extended periods during a power outage.

I've got an APC 750, works well. My company uses strictly APC products for all our business customers.
 

Warrian

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I like the fact that I can utilize PowerChute (software that came with my APC) to perform a graceful shutdown of my PC in case the power doesn't come back on after 2 mins (or however long you'd like).
 

Eomer

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I've been using Cyberpower UPS's at home and at my office the past couple years. I like that the larger ones have displays that will tell you what the wattage is, and they'll even track your computer's power consumption. Useless in practical terms, but it satisfies my inner geek.
 

Cutlery

Kill All the White People
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Their only purpose is to avoid unexpected shutdowns during very short power blips, or give you time to do a safe shutdown. They aren't supposed to keep a computer running for extended periods during a power outage.

I've got an APC 750, works well. My company uses strictly APC products for all our business customers.
Your quote included 2 trains of thought, and didn't complete the second.

I don't care much about how long I'd get to game when the power is out. My reason for buying them would be to have one on every floor and in the bedrooms running LED lighting for extended periods during a power outage. I don't pretend to know if the time/wattage is a direct scaling or not, but it sure seems like if you can get 13 minutes out of 210w, you could power a 4w LED bulb for quite awhile and maintain some semblance of civilized life when storms roll through.

It's just that $115 buys a lot of candles.
 

ShakyJake

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I had the power blink off for 15 seconds just now...getting tired of this. I finally decided I need to buy a UPS.

Okay, so how many watts would I need to power two computers for 5 minutes or so? -- just long enough to keep things running during blippish power outages that I occasionally experience. One computer has a 750W P/S and the other is 650W. Most computers, honestly, just sit idle. Neither are sitting there doing intensive operations (does that even matter? no idea). Oh, and I have two 24" monitors.
 

kegkilla

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I just found a Cyberpower surge protector in my basement. will I be (relatively) safe with this, sans the protection for an all out blackout, or am I really much better with a UPS?
 

Gaige

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UPS are about proper shutdowns and auto voltage regulation, surge protectors just protect against surges.
 

Eomer

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I had the power blink off for 15 seconds just now...getting tired of this. I finally decided I need to buy a UPS.

Okay, so how many watts would I need to power two computers for 5 minutes or so? -- just long enough to keep things running during blippish power outages that I occasionally experience. One computer has a 750W P/S and the other is 650W. Most computers, honestly, just sit idle. Neither are sitting there doing intensive operations (does that even matter? no idea). Oh, and I have two 24" monitors.
Need to know what the two computers have under the hood. Most computers are only going to consume about 100 watts or even less at idle, not counting monitors. At load in a game if you have a reasonably beefy GPU you might get up to 300-450W each, depending on what exactly you're running and if you OC. Each 24" monitor is probably around 75 watts at a guess.

UPS's are rated both in how much power they can deliver max in VA or watts, and how long they can deliver it for.
 

ShakyJake

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Need to know what the two computers have under the hood.
One computer is an i2500K non-overclocked. Video card is a Radeon 6970, houses an 120GB SSD and a 750GB 5400RPM HDD. Second computer is an AMD 965, again non-overclocked. Video is a Radeon 4850, contains 3 1TB 5400RPM hard drives and a 250GB 7200PRM drive. That's about it.

Don't really want to spend a ton of money. Do you think this would be sufficient?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16842101311

Again, power tends to blink off for a few seconds at most. I have no intention of running the equipment any longer than it might take to shut everything down (a minute tops).
 

Eomer

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Well, if the power blinked off while one computer was gaming and the other was idle but the monitor was on, you'd probably be at or past the maximum power draw it can handle. If both were idle with monitors off you'd be around half of it's rating. For a single computer it would likely be fine. For both, I'd say it's pretty borderline and you'd probably want to go for something around 600-750 watts max rating.

You could always buy a power consumption meter and see what your computers are pulling down in typical usage scenarios and go from there. As an example, my desktop is an old Q9550 cpu with a Nvidia 680 and a 24" Dell monitor (other components are fairly irrelevant, HDs/SSDs are a couple watts basically). Under full load with Prime95 and Furmark and the monitor on it will pull about 450 watts with some very mild overclocking (no voltage tweaking). Your main computer would be pretty similar.

Keep in mind that even with power at the wall, the UPS will alarm and potentially shut down if you exceed it's rating.