Ups ?

Well, I was doing a respec, and on the last wave, the power went out. When it came back on, my computer wouldn't turn on.

I figured that if there's no power, it was likely the power supply. So, I took out the power supply, a 650 watt LSP Ultra, which had a pretty good rating and reviews at Tiger Direct. Then I installed my older 430 watt. I figured I better take out my GTX 460 video card because I wasn't certain it could hang with the lower amps of the older power supply.

Here's the thing - Aside from the monitor, odds are, if lightning strikes again, I could piece together a newer system for less than 500 bucks that's likely better than the one I have now. (or had before the lightning.) As it stands, there's nothing wrong with anything in the system except the 650 W power supply.

My question is, though - I had a surge protector. Aren't they supposed to protect against things like this? If not, then what does?

During the MSR earlier this evening, the leader mention being grateful for a UPS. Would one of those help? (Uninteruptible Power Supply - not to be confused with the power supply that goes into the tower)

I already have a new MB, CPU, power supply and memory in my shopping cart, but I don't want to fork over hundreds of dollars when the next storm might take my system out again.

Oh -- really interesting -- now that I have the older 7300LE card in, I don't notice ANY difference at all.

Your system performance isn't likely any different because of your computer's performance sucking wind. Trust me, I had less than ideal performance with a GTX 465 before a friend had me do a quick few things and suddenly I had ultra mode almost maxed.


The UPS is more of a battery back-up. They are meant to give you time to shut down so you don't lose data.

If the power surge did damage something on your computer, check your surge protector. They sometimes have warranties that protect anything connected through them up to a certain value. You can get the parts replaced then.


I guess the question is, does the power go out often there? A UPS would only really be worth the expense then, since they are not cheap.

From prior experience, Surge Protectors are semi-decent (depending on the device rating) for dealing with minor surges but not with anything more than that.

You mentioned a lightning strike and I've had several experiences with those. My house was struck 4 times in a 3 year span. Various items in the house were affected in different ways each time, mostly by changes we made in how we protected some of the equipment.

During the first lightning strike, we lost the monitor (on the business computer) that was still turned on, a Laser printer and the modem in my computer. Luckily, both computers were turned off at the time. The modem got blown through the phone jack due to a surge through an electrical line that crossed over the phone line in the attic. I rerouted all of the phone lines after that so that they weren't lying near electrical lines and had no more problems.

For the computers, we started with trying to go with surge protectors with high Joule ratings and still lost equipment. One of the items we lost was a Laser Printer. This was back in the early to mid 90's when Laser printers were definitely a luxury item. I think we paid somewhere around 900 for the printer when it was new. The replacement was around 700 and we didn't replace the second one when it went out. Inkjet printers had improved enough in quality by then to let us get away from the higher quality that the Laser printer produced.

When the business computer got blasted in the second lightning strike, even with high priced and high Joule rated surge protectors, we had to buy a new computer. After discussing it with some Tech friends we decided to go ahead and buy a UPS when we bought the new computer. After getting the UPS and the new computer, we didn't have any more trouble on the computer and printer side of things with the next two lightning strikes.

We installed a complex ground-rod system to handle our CB radio, tower, rotor and antenna after burning up various components and having major repairs on the radio. After getting this configured correctly, we had no more damage on any of that equipment.

We installed surge protectors with extremely high Joule ratings and Coax connectors on our Televisions, Satellite receivers and TV antenna equipment. After those changes, we stopped having problems with those as well. We had one LNB go out on a dish, but we put it on a similar ground-rod scheme we were using with the CB equipment and had no further damage to the LNBs.

They had a few more direct strikes while I was in Colorado, and nothing of what we had changed the protection on was affected at all.

I had learned my lessons in all of this and bought a new UPS while living in Colorado. I wasn't getting direct lightning strikes, but one of my apartment complexes was constantly having surges, spikes and brown-outs and my computers were never affected. I had two computers running 24/7 since I had an FTP site on one and the other was just convenient to leave on in case I needed to remote in to look at specific hardware settings or other files that weren't on the FTP server.

We had an accident right next to the apartment complex one night when a driver took out one of the electrical poles that had transformers mounted on it. I had no damage at all to either of the computers, any of the three printers or the two monitors. All were on at the time. Others in the apartment complex had computers totally blown out at the time since they were merely "on" at the time. The only other people I talked to that didn't have any problems were two that had their computers turned off at the time and one that also had a good UPS on his system, mostly due to conversations we had had in the past.

After moving back to Texas, I've replaced one UPS and bought two more to go on my video equipment and DVRs instead of surge protectors. I've had a few hard outages that have blown lights, but no damage to any of the equipment.

A few things to keep in mind. Always buy a quality UPS, not something cheap. Cheaper units tend to not protect against the surges and drops as well as quality units do. That is the most important factor for me since I'm in a rural area and see my lights dim at times and (as noted) have had direct lightning strikes on the house. For brand, I stick with APC since they've always been reliable for me. I have the added benefit that if I need a replacement battery, I can always get one from work until I can make the half-hour drive to the store that sells them.

Make sure it has a high enough rating for what you are trying to protect and power. For home users, it isn't as important to have 100% uptime as it is to protect from the surges, spikes, and drops in power. Also, you want to make sure it has enough outlets to protect all of the items that are essential to protect. Tower, monitor, router and modem are my most essential, but I can also protect my printer and the Print server with my setup.

tl;dr version

Get a good quality UPS. You'll be glad you did.

Depends on how you define "cheap". A UPS will provide power. A decent UPS will also condition the power so that spikes and drops are smoothed out. A decent UPS will also have a surge protector inside.

A basic surge protector may or may not actually protect your equipment. If you have your cable/dsl modem hooked up directly to the cable outlet, your computer is still vulnerable. Unless you're on fiberoptic, as with Verizon FIOS.

In addition, there's the matter of response time to consider. A surge protector basically has a fuse in it. It takes time for that fuse to burn out under a large surge. While the fuse is burning out, there's still potentially damaging levels of electricity flowing into your computer. A fuse that burns out in fractions of a millisecond is better than a fuse that burns out in milliseconds.

Thanks very much guys for some useful information.

Some of you should consider teaching.

Have a nice day!