Looking for advice on UPS setup...

Sarra · December 8, 2020

So, I currently have two machines, with plans for a third (eventually, maybe soonish?). The eventual plan is for three machines: A R9 5900x with a 6800XT GPU, a 3900x machine with a Radeon Pro W5500 GPU, and my old Haswell based Xeon machine with a GTX 980. The First machine will be running SSD's, with one rust-flinger 4, 6, or 8TB editing drive, the 3900x machine will have an SSD and a pair of 6 or 8TB RAID 1 drives, and the old Haswell is going to have a bunch of 6 or 8 TB drives, and run FreeNAS. For monitors, I'm looking at a 27" 144hz or faster 2k panel, and three older 24" LED LCD's. Audio is going to be going to headphones.

So, I currently have two CyberPower UPS units. One is rated for 510 watts, the other for 900 watts. The 510 watt unit is really old, and I think it should be replaced, though it barely ever gets used, though when I need it, it has always provided solid power for me. The other unit is newer, but is also around 6 years old.

Do I need 3 or 4 units? I have all of my network gear running off the older unit. We have a landline that's VOIP, so if the internet drops out, we have no phone. During the fires last September, the Sheriff called our landline, and even though the power was totally out here, the phone still worked because the modem was plugged into the UPS.

Does CyberPower still make good UPS units, or should I look into another brand? The 900 watt unit is great when the 3900x I already have is idling, but my runtime is pretty minimal when running anything work intensive, I pull about 300 watts from it when rendering. My Haswell Xeon is currently doing emergency transcoding, and has been sitting at 100% CPU load for the past 50 hours, and I'm pulling 275w from the old UPS, which gives me almost no battery run time... Any suggestions on configuration? I have a pair of 8 amp outlets accessible to me, with two more 8 amp outlets nearby (which I will probably be using for the Xeon machine). Pretty sure two Ryzen 9 CPU's and a high end GPU/workstation GPU shouldn't overrun my current capacity. Oh, last thing, the house was built by an electrical engineer, so the copper in the walls is actually really overbuilt. A electrician offered to replace the entire wiring in the house for free, just because he could make a buttload of money off the excess copper... We've literally never blown a fuse in this house, ever. And no, we don't have circuit breakers, we have fuses.

Oh, I take that back, we've blown fuses... But only for additions, mostly for the irrigation system.

LWM723 · December 8, 2020

Just replace the batteries. The UPS's are still good. And it would be cheaper.

Sarra · December 9, 2020

8 hours ago, LWM723 said:

Just replace the batteries. The UPS's are still good. And it would be cheaper.

I still need to get a third unit. I could run two PC's off a single UPS, but if I'm gaming on one and rendering on the other, I probably would overload the current capacity of the UPS.