Does DS recommend a Battery Backup?

I have recently ordered my new DS rig and I was wondering if DS advises the use of a battery backup?

Thank you very much I will look at the APC products right now and post again if I have any other questions.

All my sensitive equipment, PC's LCD TV's are plugged into Battery backups, The battery part is not ESSENTIAL but you really should have some form of Power Conditioning between your gear and the Power Transformer out side.

I'll ask Sarah to chime in here.

That would be awesome! It would be cool if you could provide everybody with a "if you have a 600 watt power supply, use this model, and if you have a 1200 watt power supply, use this model" type thing.

Battery Backup only needs to keep you running long enough to shutdown or to smoothe out transient power fluctuations.  It really shouldnt be relied upon for long term operations during power outages.  Thats what having a Generator or Solar panels on the house is for  

Yep but usually they are way over provisioned, you dont really need more than 2 or 3 minutes to power down safely, and the Backup units are usually good for way more than that if you are just running the PC and Monitor off it.  Just because the Power Supply in the PC is rated for say 1200 watts, that does not mean you are actually drawing that much im fact you will rarely even come close to that max..  My current system with an OC'd  Q6600 (at 3.2Ghz)  a GTX 285 GPU that is OC'd  a 30" monitor and several peripherals plugged in draws less than 700 watts when I hear power go, and start shutting things down it idles at about 300 to 400 watts... and an 900va bbu has never had any problem.  I even have my floor lamp plugged into the BBU....just because the outlet is convenient.

Now Im sure theres an engineer here who might quibble with my lack of intimate details and I could go into ohms law and how power works etc, but I dont want to, takes too long and it can get very math heavy.  So I deal in generalities.  In general a 1200VA BBU is waaay more than you will ever need for your PC.

PS.  I run a laptop, 2x28" monitors, 2 1TB external HDD's a 30" TV, cable box and a phone w/ headset off a single 800va BBU


Edited by MagiK - 13 Nov 2010 at 1:32pm

well it will probably be a rare occurance when im gaming while the power goes out i read on the apc site it has a fuse that will blow and shut of the power. do the apcs ds offers have a display showing the power being currently used?

Most higher APC UPS units have a LCD display that displays information without the use of a computer, like Wattage used, estimated battery runtime, event logs, and general status. Otherwise, you can use the supplied APC PowerChute program that will tell you the same thing, as well as indicating when to replace your battery (~5 years), giving you the option to run self-tests, and giving you a full event log of outages/brownouts/etc.

DS may carry the BX1500 or HX1500 as their 1500VA model, I'm not sure. Either one has an integrated LCD, I've owned both.

Reading Alex's first post, you know, it makes sense to plug in your monitor. For emergencies where you need to shut down your computer, you should be plugging in everything to your battery backup that would be essential to shutting down your computer. How can you see your keyboard/mouse without a light? How can you see your mouse without a monitor? Battery backup can handle them too. For your situation, I recommend you plug in your primary display (the one with your Windows Taskbar), and leave the others plugged into your surge only outlets or just to another surge protector (not necessarily a battery backup)

BX1500 on bottom left displaying wattage usage. The HX model looks a lot sleeker.



Edited by ablahblah - 13 Nov 2010 at 3:33pm

Model number is BX1500LCD