Is this "Power Boost" a useful and/or neccessary item?

[WarYur]

I was wondering if anyone has used the EVGA Power Boost (http://www.evga.com/articles/00600/)  (Can I say EVGA on here?  Shhh.)  It's supposed to provide cleaner power to the PCI-E bus improving stability but not knowing some of the finer points of the PCI-E bus I have to ask.  IDK, perhaps it is just a gimmick to make more money and/or something that a Gigabyte motherboard wouldn't need.  

Any opinions?

[Dark Mantis]

Hi WarYur

Personally I can't really see the need for it as  there should be plenty of power supplied via the usual 24 and 8 pin connectors from the PSU to the motherboard anyway. High power drains such as GPUs will normally have their own power supply connection anyway. Seems gimmicky to me.

[Aussie Allan]

    Hi WarYur

 You'll probably get several answers over the life of this thread worth noting, .... here's mine,... the biggest bang for buck you can possibly effect as far as feeding your beast good clean power is a quality UPS.......don't go for the entry level (notice I didn't say cheapest) I picked up a ripper (High end) on ebay for peanuts knowing I had to replace the battery's.

  The feature applicable to you is the Power "Bucking" feature which effectively means for UK  users is anything from 210 to 270V in one end and nice , constant, clean 230v +/- 0.02V.... out the business end to the UPS..... I know this first hand as this is one of the reasons I brought it in the first.

 My house is one of the first of the grid/power pole in my street and for two years I enjoyed anything from 238v through to 266V depending on peak and non-peak loading.....

  Some of the other features you will enjoy is , Safe Raid0.........Laptop users take it for granted, see how they would react by having no battery on-board during a blackout.

  When the lights go out,... you have 10 to 15 leisurely minutes to shut down, blackout are nothing compared to brown outs with any raid!

 Other features are you can configure through the windows interface to shut-down when your not there if there's an outage, hell mine even sends me a text message ......... and yes mate, they make them for 110V as well

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

I would certtainly agree there on the benefits of having a good quality UPS system.  They do give a lot of comfort and safety. Mien will keep my whole system up for about 30 - 45 minutes after which time the problem is probably cleared anyway. They are not excactly cheap but they are worth their weight in gold if you have power distribution issues. Do not try and connect up a laser printer to the UPS though because of the initial start up load is too much.

[WarYur]

@ DM; Yes you are probably right on the gimmicky.  I kindof thought that too but had to ask because it sounded right but not totally understanding the electrical goings on throughout the motherboard (yet) I thought to ask.  On the EVGA forums when that $9.99US product came out it seemed like everyone was running to buy one so of course I just had to run with the pack.    I never did use it though so I thought perhaps I would use it now. Guess not...

@ AA;  Have to ask, what do you consider to be "cheap" in a UPS system?  I do have a Tripp-lite 1000UB UPS (http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/Specialty-Products.cfm?MDLID=4497) connected to or will be connected to the new, sometime in the near future, (alleged) rig I am working on at or trying to work on if I could just get everything I need together in the same place at the same time.  The Tripp-Lite was around a $100 US bought at a local members only store.  (Costco).  I believe they are around $129 everywhere else although this one in particular was probably made exclusively for Costco as they do that a lot with different products they have there.

I am glad that you brought that up though because I really hadn't taken a close enough look at how much time I had after a power outage to save whatever I was doing.  For some reason I was under the impression that I had an hours worth of battery backup but from what I just read it appears that I only have 9 minutes on half load and 3 minutes on full. 

When I bought it, or had the last one that I had replaced rather becasue Costco has an awesome replacement program if anything should go wrong with something that they sell, the PSU that I was using was only a 550w and so that the backup system would have lasted a bit longer but then I went to a 1000W and am now running an Antec 1200W OC version PSU so perhaps I should re-think what I should have for a UPS system now. 

Let;s see, the only other items that I had on there on the battery backup side of it was the PC, the printer (thanks DM I will disconnect it now), and the Logitech Z5500 5.1 surround sound system, and the Vonage phone box.  I am not sure how much of a UPS I need for at least a half hour of backup time on full load though so if you have a suggestion I would sure appreciate it.   When the last one went down I emailed a tech at Tripp Lite and he told me that those things are considered to be disposable since the life is only expected to be from 4-5 years so I was glad that I bought it at Costco but I don't think they have any other UPS systems there, just the one for computers and the like

[Aussie Allan]

  The only real way of knowing is to do the numbers!....... Any fool can spend Money, wait till you need a sparky at your place, He'll have a cool bit of kit in his toolbox that looks like a big pair of tongs with a LCD readout.........it allows him to put a loop around any power cable and read in watts What your machine is ACTUALLY pulling ....... I took two readings, idle and full load.

 With this custom information you can work out your best and worse case scenario for the UPS in question

   Mine was about £160 all up but they can go to 6 or 700 hundred.......I ended up with a Zigor Danubio 2000..... meets my needs ATM and have not looked back.......as long as there's all the right features.........$100 sound like a bargain......expect a battery pack to last about 3 yrs.

 As DM stated, Monitor and PC only .... no printers or hair dryers.........one last feature I forgot about..........extra lightening strike protection

 Aussie Allan

[WarYur]

Oh ya mine has all that but it's probably not enough in wattage I think.  It has line noise protection, protection from current spikes or whatever you call them and in this apartment complex and more so in this particular building for some reason we have them all the time.  We don't usually get any chance for a "sparky" as you call them to come int our apartments so I will probably have to buy one of those current checker thingies.  (technical eh?)  Our regular outlets are only 125v though and most houses and some apartments like mine have a 220v for the dryer (clothes that is).  If I ever get a lightening strike my system just shuts down but then I would be dead too wouldn't I.  Geez now it looks like I am going to have to start wearing something to ground myself when I am walking about my apartment!  It will be all your fault if lightening does strike BTW.  There's a hospital directly across the street in case of that too.

But no hair dryer?  Bummer...

[Dark Mantis]

Hi WarYur

Don't waste your money on a clamp meter as you probably won't use it again. Al you need to do is pull the plug from the mains supply and you will soon find out how long your UPS will hold up for.

The whole point in a UPS system apart from conditioning your supply to your system is to give you enough time to finish working on whatever you are doing and save it before shutting down. For most people this is sufficient. If you want to keep running regardless if the power totally fails then you are going to be looking at something much more expensive. Probably the most respected company for this is APC and they make UPS systems for everything from the home user to huge industrial server backup power grids.

http://apcpower.co.uk/upsdata.html

[WarYur]

Thanks DM.  I have seen the APC battery backup's in some of the local stores but online is always better since our state (Washington on the Pacific side of things) has one of the highest tax rates and most items taxed that most all of the states.  The powers that be even tried to tax candy bars and bottled water not too long ago but were only successful for a while until the voters got it overturned.  Lovely how the government tries to pull stuff like that without the approval of the voters.

I only bought the Tripp Lite because they were a good price at that membership chain I was telling you all about.  I will look into the APC units when this one dies then.  Power surges was what I was trying to say earlier but I am sure that you already figured that one out.

For the most part I think the one I have now is sufficient for what it needs to do though, with time to finish whatever and shut down properly.

Since there is a hospital directly across the street from me, the apartment buildings that are on this side of the street like the one i am in usually get their power turned back on fairly quickly due to being on the same line of the hospital.  Of course they have their own generators for emergencies but they still have a priority for regular power when there is a need. 

So did either of you guys take a look at the Trip Lite that I have's specs?  You are right though DM it wouldn't be cost effective to buy one of those clamp meters (I have never heard that term before though) and would be quite easy to do it the way you suggest.

In all actuality though the reason that I bought my UPS in the first place was that there were four apartments, one to the left of me and the two below that were having really bad surges and the power company had to come in and dig a huge ditch that ran probably a 100 feet or so to fix whatever was happening underground.  They never did fix the real issue though which I thought had to do with the area between our apartment building and the next one north of me where in the middle of the summer heat when everything else is all dried up the ground in that lawn space was (is) always very soggy to the point where three nice sized trees rotted out from it and I believe that it effected the electrical stuff underground as well.  My power bill for a 525sq ft apartment (smallest one bedroom I have ever lived in when having to have an apartment) was sometimes over a $100 where when i first moved in here it was only around $25-$30.  It is now usually around $40 a month though but then i haven't had that 1200w Antec running much lately.  I am looking forward to finding out just how much of a power draw that this PC will bring when I get it built.  I didn't used to do this but I shut something like that down when i am not using it where back a few years ago I would have just elt the PC run all the time but that would have only been a 500w PC then too.

Anyway guys thanks for the info.  I do love to learn new stuff!

[Dark Mantis]

Hi WarYur

You could always buy a Kill-O-Watt meter though. t is just a cheap little adapter that fits in between the load(computer) and the mains supply and will give you all sorts of data like Voltage, Wattage,  VA, KWH, Hz etc. The benefit of this is that you can use it on any appliance.

Your Tripp Lite UPS is ok but it is more to keep people feeling safe than actually doing it! It is only a low power version and doesn't give you much backup at best. Will do for now but don't expect to much of it.