I've got two different APC's one is 1 year old, and the other is 10 years old. I bought a new battery for the 10 yr old one about 2 years ago.

 

Cool, thanks. I'll probably ask for one for my upcoming birthday. And you say they act as a surge protector, yes?

 

ya, nice feature on my new one is "controlled by master" So i put computer in as Master plug, and the UPS will automatically turn my monitors on and off with the computer because they are in the controlled outlets

 

APC or Tripp-Lite line interactive UPS. 750va is sufficient.

 

Pat and glc, thanks.

 

Just went and picked up a APC XS1300 Back-UPS, 1300VA @ 780W, line interactive. It has a nice little LED monitor on the front and even has the master feature that Patrick is talking about. Not bad for $149

 

Sounds like the one I picked up at Sam's Club a couple years ago - a NS1250, almost identical. I have 4 computers (normally only run 2 at a time), a monitor, modem, router, and switch connected to it. It can handle the load of all 4 computers if I fire them all up.

I have my TV, DVD player, and cable box/DVR on a NS600.

 

I think mine came charged, not sure. It shows battery as 100%, but when I kill the power, even a little 13W laptop drains it to about 10 minutes....hmmm

One thing I do not like...I have two monitors and this UPS has that master kill feature. But I cannot put them on the master kill feature outlets because those are on the surge only side. They have to be plugged into the battery side because if the power goes out, how am I supposed to save my work? Still a nice UPS, thanks for the help.

My computer parts should be here in 2-3 days. Newegg decided to split my order into 5 different ones! Case from NJ by itself. All the internals also from New Jersey, in their own box. Video card from Mississippi, and then the cooler and hard drives from California. WTF lol

 

Drain it till it shuts off, then remove all loads and charge for 24 hours.

When mine kicks in, with 2 computers, 1 monitor, modem, router, and switch running - the display is estimating about 20 minutes.

 

I'll just point out that a UPS is not meant to be an "alternate" power source to run your stuff "normally". It's there as a bridge to give you time to save your work and shut the PC down normally. I think a 10 min runtime with a 13W laptop sounds pretty feeble, but the display may be lying to you. I'd wait and see what it says with a desktop hooked up to it.

I'm not a fan of "draining batteries". I know that's touted as a way of resetting the timer, but there is NO battery that likes to be deeply discharged. It shortens their life and reduces their full-charge capacity. Additionally, if the battery is multi-cell, it is very likely that one of the cells will experience a reverse current flow as the charge level reaches the minimum. That will ruin that cell.

- Jack

 

A good UPS has circuitry that prevents total discharge. It will shut down when it's still safe. I'm suggesting this as a "one time" deal just to make sure you start off with a true full charge.

 

This thread makes me want to upgrade again. Only thing I really need are new graphics card/s. The rest of my system is still pretty solid and I am too cheap to buy an SSD.

 

I just built my new gaming compuer last week and I put an ASUS 660ti graphics card in her. If you can compare prices, its almost better to just get 2 660ti's over one 700 series. Running SLI is going to be amazing. I will be picking up my second 660 ti later this week. And I have to agree with the 3570k. I have mine OC'ed to 4.2 right now and she is purring. The only real difference between the i5 and the i7 is an extra 2mb cache. Thats it, and if you arent running serious video editing software, there really isn;t a point to spending the $$ on the i7 when the i5 is more than enough. Just my .02

 

The i7 is also hyperthreaded. 8 virtual cores.

SLI is not amazing all the time. Only games written for it will benefit, and scaling is not consistent. It also requires a high quality power supply with adequate capacity.

660Ti's are running in the $250 range. I'd be willing to bet that a single $400 770 will be a better value than SLI 660Ti's.

 

Exactly. For the specific games I use, two SLIs will actually be worse than a single. Plus, the new 7-series is faster in just about every way than the 6-series. Ti's are outdated already.

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-...rce-GTX-660-Ti
http://www.hwcompare.com/14631/gefor...force-gtx-770/

Very rarely do I consider a price as the sole benefit of getting one thing over another. If you plan to have a computer for a couple years, whats ~$150 for a GPU that's 52% faster? As a good friend always tells me: "you only suffer the cost of something good once, whereas you suffer from crappy quality of something cheap forever"

I plan to OC mine to 4.5GHz safe with 1.2v, which should be a good benefit. The few professional reviews I read says that even though the Haswell is about 10*C hotter than a Ivy, a 4.3GHz Haswell is the same as a 4.7GHZ Ivy. I went with the i7 because even though my flight sim is 32-bit, I run about 5 programs (flight planning software, real-time weather, multiplayer networking) etc in the background that will benefit from it. Plus its just cool as hell to say you have the flagship processor.

Tracking my stuff, everything is now on the east coast with a delivery on the 5th (I'll be working) so im starting to get excited. I'm about to go hookup the laptop to the UPS and give it a drain. I have my desk already neatly organized, with a space and cables dangling for that tower