Surge Protection/UPS

[joenewbie]

What is the recommendation for a build like mine? How much is enough what's a good unit to buy... I have this one coming but not sure if I'm going to use it or return it based on some of the crappier reviews. I figured someone here would know better than most of those amazon reviewer when we're talking specific to the needs of a build like mine below.

I have this surge protector/UPS on the way from UPS... pun intended.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Z80ICM/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


And my system as follows.

Case: Corsair Obsidian Series Black 550D Mid Tower Computer Case

PSU: Corsair CX750 Builder Series ATX 80 PLUS Bronze Certified Power Supply

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD5H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155

Liquid Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler H80i

Additional Fans: Corsair Air Series SP120 High Performance Edition

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800)

Graphics card: MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Graphics Card N660 TF 2GD5/OC

Sound card: Onboard

Hard Drive(s): Boot: Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch (9.5mm) SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive CT256M4SSD2
Data: Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 7200 RPM 3.5-Inch

Optical Drive(s): Asus 24xDVD-RW Serial ATA Internal OEM Drive DRW-24B1ST

Monitor: Asus VS247H-P 24-Inch Full-HD LED-Lit Monitor

Wireless Adapter: D-Link DWA-552 Extreme-N Wireless PCI Adapter

Keyboard: Logitech Wireless Illuminated Keyboard K800

Mouse: Logitech M570 Wireless Trackball

Speakers: Logitech X-140 2.0 Speakers

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit (OEM) System Builder

[Alan G]

I've always bought the least expensive one available at the time and they usually have a life of four years or so before the battery cannot hold the recommended charge. You really only need to have the computer and monitor plugged into the back up circuit so that if the power goes down you have a chance to turn off the computer which takes only about 30 seconds or so to power down. Any other peripheral can plug into a general surge protector socket. I currently have two CyberPower units for the two work stations in our house and I bought them at an office supply sotre.

[joenewbie]

I've always bought the least expensive one available at the time and they usually have a life of four years or so before the battery cannot hold the recommended charge. You really only need to have the computer and monitor plugged into the back up circuit so that if the power goes down you have a chance to turn off the computer which takes only about 30 seconds or so to power down. Any other peripheral can plug into a general surge protector socket. I currently have two CyberPower units for the two work stations in our house and I bought them at an office supply sotre.

My problem tends to be when I read stuff in reviews about it not being able to give proper backup to "modern" computers I get panicky... that's my big worry, and with the one I selected having 5 with Battery Backup and the other 5 just surge protection I was only going to plug in my CPU/Monitor and the backup Drive to it, even though I don't always have the backup drive plugged into the device for obvious extra cautious reasons. I currently have all 6 plugs for all my stuff in an at least 10 year old surge protector only.... and in Vegas we're starting monsoon season so rain and lightning storms are coming... we've actually already had a couple this past week.

Only after I built that rig I realized how old the surge protector was, so yeah... needed an upgrade so hopefully this will be compatible for my needs. I'm wondering if and what the best way to test it would be, I'm getting it today via UPS, set up everything and then just yank the wall plug with everything on? Or is that too risky? Even though it's not really creating a surge I can at least test how the batter backup functions... thoughts?

[Alan G]

My back up drive is only plugged in when I need to back things up and even then it only takes a couple of minutes to do an incremental backup (new files since the last one). Most of the new units have a light on that indicates things are working OK. Remember also, the bigger the battery, the longer it will take it to charge for the first time. We get a fair number of power outages where I live here in Washington DC and you always get an annoying beeping when the power goes out to the UPS. If you do want to check it after it is charged, I would simply turn off the circuit breaker rather than pulling out the plug.

[joenewbie]

My back up drive is only plugged in when I need to back things up and even then it only takes a couple of minutes to do an incremental backup (new files since the last one). Most of the new units have a light on that indicates things are working OK. Remember also, the bigger the battery, the longer it will take it to charge for the first time. We get a fair number of power outages where I live here in Washington DC and you always get an annoying beeping when the power goes out to the UPS. If you do want to check it after it is charged, I would simply turn off the circuit breaker rather than pulling out the plug.

Yeah, Circuit breaker would be a better option. *grin* Oh also, you mentioned Cyberpower, the people in reviews of my APC mentioned them because they're saying the type of battery backup is different from Cyberpower vs APC... I'm not inclined to know the difference and when they start talking technoelectric-ese I haven't really followed what they were saying well enough to know if the APC device I bought would be good enough for the purposes I've bought it for. I just need a minute or two of battery backup to be able to do a safe shutdown and protect my stuff from getting blown out. I mean I do leave my system running when I'm not home somtimes, particularly when doing large downloads etc.... so I'm not sure how protected it is if I can't do a soft shutdown in any case, I just don't want to blowout my system for lack of trying to keep it safe.

I need to contact my insurance agent to see if my renters insurance would cover my PC if I get a power spike, and if not how much it would cost to add that kind of coverage.

[joenewbie]

As a follow up to this, battery backup is amazing, working well and has been tested through self tests twice now. I like how it has software and power conditioner as well. Battery backup will give me what they claim is 30 minutes of up time if the power goes, however during the self tests inside of 5 seconds that time dropped to 20 minutes, still good enough for me to shut the system down, or as I have the software set up to do, shut down the system on it's own after 2 minutes.

Also, I plugged the UPS into a regular surge protector to protect the UPS from surges, can't be too careful.