Spec me a UPS (or 2).

mothermachine

mothermachine

mothermachine

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Joined
8 Oct 2004
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Hi Folks,

I have 3 workstations here, plus a switch, so 4 powered devices in total (monitors etc. don't matter), which I would like to protect from power surges and power cuts (which are becoming quite common in my area, annoyingly).

I have zero experience or knowledge with UPS devices. I guess what I need/want is a UPS that will power and protect these 4 devices when surges or cuts happen and maybe email me or alert me somehow if a power cut occurs. I think some of them also come with software/scripts which will attempt to close programs and shut down manually, but I'd also like to be alerted so that I could log in remotely and deal with the issue (a second UPS would be protecting the office's router to make this possible during a cut).

I would really appreciate some advice about how these things work, what they are capable of doing and a few suggestions for actual UPS models. Budget ideally under £100 but if more is required that's ok.

And if you could also suggest a budget one that will protect 1 x workstation plus 1 x internet router that would be great as well.

Thanks!
 
And a couple of questions before I forget:

- are they noisy?
- how reliable are they (presuming certain models are better than others?)
- can they be used with basically any powered device at all?
- I presume that because my 3 workstations are quite high-end I would need a fairly juicy model with a large enough battery capacity?
 
If anyone can help with this soon I'd really appreciate it... power has just gone out here and all our machines were just shut off....! Terrible wiring or something, who knows... I'd really like to order a couple this afternoon to get the next day delivery.

Cheers,
 
You really need to work out how many watts you require and go from there.

I would be looking at running each workstation on its own smaller UPS for even more redundancy.

I run an APC Smart 1500 UPS on my main PC and the fan on that only comes on when everything is maxing out.

The batteries will need replacing after a few years or so depending on usage, a good UPS (Like the APC ones) will do checks every week to make sure it is running well.
 
^JP^ said:
You really need to work out how many watts you require and go from there.

I would be looking at running each workstation on its own smaller UPS for even more redundancy.

I run an APC Smart 1500 UPS on my main PC and the fan on that only comes on when everything is maxing out.

The batteries will need replacing after a few years or so depending on usage, a good UPS (Like the APC ones) will do checks every week to make sure it is running well.
Click to expand...

That's really useful - thanks. Is there a straightforward way to work out total power draw from my 3 workstations? They are i7 970s (2 of them), one of them is a 3930k @ 4ghz, all with GTX560/580 which are never pushed far above idle. It's all about CPU usage with these, really.

Perhaps 3 x cheaper UPS would be the way to go...

Cheers,
 
I just ran through a PSU calculator and it came out with around 1550W total for all 3 machines when at almost full load. Around 450W each for the 2 lesser workstations and around 650 for the main workstation.
 
Considering how expensive UPS tend to be, and that you can buy a power measuring plug for something like £10 (or iirc persuade an electricity company to post you one free), measuring power consumption would be more sensible than using the ridiculously inaccurate website calculators knocking about online.

Do all three need to stay powered? I have a workstation, but all the data is on another box over the network. If you have a similar setup, you might only need a UPS on the data storage box.
 
JP - cheers mate. Good to know that a reconditioned one might be an option. Budget has just exploded...

Jon - cheers - Time is of the essence, hence my rushing to find a solution. But I think your advice is sound. I think I might just buy one to cover the main workstation for now - the others are purely for rendering and access files on the primary workstation. At least I know for sure that these machines can take a power cut when no files are open and still recover just fine.
 
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