PCA Forums

i'm looking to replace my far too old, undersized UPS. the CyberPower units seem to have good reviews and pricing, but i'm curious about the power output in general. many of the UPS units sold generate a "simulated" sine wave rather than a pure sine wave. anyone have experience (good or bad) with the simulated sine output?

i've heard some PSUs and other electronics have issues with non-pure waves...but i'm also guessing it's unlikely to affect me.

thanks for any input!

I have been disappointed in the CyberPower units. They invariably over state their ratings.

I stick with APC. I recently bought an APC XS1000 which gives you a realtime digital display of voltage, power drain, battery condition, and estimated battery time. With my file server, workstation and two 22" LCDs connected to it I get an estimated 19 minutes battery time. With the LCD's turned off (as they normally are when I'm not working) it shows 22 minutes.

I thought about splurging for the XS1500 but the XS1000 was on sale for $100 at the time (normally $130).

BTW: The XS1500 is on sale through Saturday for $150 right now at Office Depot ($200 less $50 instant rebate). That's a nice deal and only $20 more than the XS1000.

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/2 ... s-Battery/

Oh, best feature of the XS series is there's a button to disable the audio alarm. In a home, that alarm is useless and aggravating. Saves me the trouble of opening the unit and cutting the wires on the beeper.

perfect...I'll probably make a trip over to the local store this evening and grab one. thanks!

If you haven't purchased it yet, I've got a pile of AVAYA UPSs that I recently obtained locally from a server farm that all work fine that I'll sell for a very reasonable price (shipping will be difficult, but I won't charge more than it costs me). I only needed two, but they came in a lot of 5. These are true UPSs that do not allow voltage sags, because they are always running off of & charging the batteries.

Been meaning to try to post them here for a while, but been too busy.

http://img257.imageshack.us/i/dscf0017ep.jpg/
http://img541.imageshack.us/i/dscf0018w.jpg/
http://img46.imageshack.us/i/dscf0021b.jpg/

I have a xs1300 that for some reason BB sold it for $50 like a year ago to me. its a nice unit. my rig pulls about 200W and has a run time of about 20 minuets.

thanks all...i ended up being too lazy to pick it up and opted for the free delivery. i went with the 1500 model FP linked to. i'll report back once it is online.

follow-up...

i have the APC BX1500G (1500VA/865 Watt) up and running and it seems to be perfect for what i need. running my primary tower puts it at about 150w or so on average (less than i thought it would run). my tower, router, dsl modem, and a few external drives are all on it with plenty of breathing room. nice looking unit, the LCD is useful, and the price was right.

main system: E8500, Radeon 4850, 8GB, three HDs, 700W psu (2x25A rails)

Wow, that's pretty impressively low power draw on a relatively hefty system. Now load up Crysis or something heavy. I'm curious what fill draw it'll pull.

My i7 workstation also uses a surprisingly low amount of power until I fire up a 3D game. I do have Intel's "SpeedStep" enabled so the CPU throttles down under light load.

i have an xs 1500 and a quad core athlon with 2 cd roms 3 hdds and a radeon 5770 and a water cooling system. it draws 200w idle 320 at full load with an antec 700w 80+ psu installed. with my old psu it drew 440 watts at full load. so if you wanna save juice get a 80+ certified psu. the amd board is suposed to shut off the cpu cores not in use to save more power but i cant get it to work.

here is the usage from pc off, to idle desktop, to running L4D (in-game, not at the menu which is a bit lower). my boot drive is a 300GB velociraptor, the other two are 500GB seagate 7200.11s i think.


PC off (router and dsl modem only):


@ desktop, idle:


L4D in-game: