If you don’t use a battery backup, and you still use your PC for any number of even SEMI-important things, may I recommend that you look into buying one.  Mine has saved me countless times in the past year or so on power outages and hiccups. 

However, this is something you hopefully won’t have to see on your monitoring application:

Bad Things to see on your Batter Backup Device - Editorial 2

My APC unit is rated at 1500VA and 865 watts of power.  That should be more than enough right?  Well, based on this screen I have 934 watts of power being used, and I have under 1 minute of battery time if power should go out.  Actually, the unit told me that if power goes out, it won’t be able to do jack all the machines will power down.

I’m sure you’re wondering what is plugged into that to use 934 watts of power, so here’s a quick list:

  • Machine 1 (mine): A64 3400+, 6800GT, 4 HDDs+DVDROM, 2 20″ LCD monitors
  • Machine 2: A64 4000+, X800XT, 1 HDD+DVDROM
  • Machine 3: P4 840 XE (dual core) X800 XT, 2 HDDs+DVDROM
  • Machine 4: P4 XE 3.73, X800 XT, 1 HDD+DVDROM
  • 19″ CRT monitor
  • Two Koolance EXOS units

Ouch, to say the least.  Though it make a good Folding or SETI farm, eh?  😉

Work has been progressing quickly on the house, and that has the unfortunate side effect of delaying things here at PCP sometimes.  Having to drive an hour and a half each way to go look at the house and answer some questions the builder has gets in the way of things quite a bit.  I was working on the Intel dual core article to go up early this week, but that is definitely going to be pushed BACK to the end of the week.  I also have the first NF4 Intel Edition board on the test table, though its having a lot stability issues right now.  Also, a look at super-budget GPUs should be up soon too.

Stay tuned!