I would recommend going to an office supply auction. They will basically give you dead UPSs for free and the 3rd party replacement batteries for them can be had for $50-$75. Well worth it to protect a high value asset such as your desktop PC. Definitely cheaper than a new motherboard.
god, I wish my finances were well off enough to be able to blow 50-75 bucks on something like that.
to be fair, I’ve only lost 2 PCs to catastrophic failure.
Neither were because of the power.
One was from a lightning strike. one was from a GPU catastrophically failing and taking the motherboard with it by turning both into charcoal (and no, that wasnt because the PSU, that PSU was perfectly fine and powered many computers after this one with no incident)
My finances are in similarly poor shape for the last 2 years now (why it’s so is a long story), so I know exactly how you feel. For what it’s worth, a surge protector is much cheaper, but only helps with overvoltage, not undervoltage AFAIK. Still could potentially save your PC, not from a failed bios flash, but from any weird surges. But if you have a high quality PSU, it can probably handle somewhat unstable power. I just googled mine and it says it has full-range active PFC, automatically handling the input voltage range of 100V to 240V - though the grid here is 230V per phase so I should probably get a surge protector myself. Those are like 20€ new apparently. If you’re on a lower voltage grid like in the US and your PSU has a similar range, you probably don’t need to worry about overvoltage.
I’ve never had a failed bios flash.
but i still sit in pants shitting terror every time i have to do one. it doesnt help that power isnt the most stable thing where i live.
Because that one time it bricked something or went wrong is raw.
How you have unstable power and no UPS?
This little thing called being a poor ass bitch.
I would recommend going to an office supply auction. They will basically give you dead UPSs for free and the 3rd party replacement batteries for them can be had for $50-$75. Well worth it to protect a high value asset such as your desktop PC. Definitely cheaper than a new motherboard.
god, I wish my finances were well off enough to be able to blow 50-75 bucks on something like that.
to be fair, I’ve only lost 2 PCs to catastrophic failure.
Neither were because of the power.
One was from a lightning strike. one was from a GPU catastrophically failing and taking the motherboard with it by turning both into charcoal (and no, that wasnt because the PSU, that PSU was perfectly fine and powered many computers after this one with no incident)
My finances are in similarly poor shape for the last 2 years now (why it’s so is a long story), so I know exactly how you feel. For what it’s worth, a surge protector is much cheaper, but only helps with overvoltage, not undervoltage AFAIK. Still could potentially save your PC, not from a failed bios flash, but from any weird surges. But if you have a high quality PSU, it can probably handle somewhat unstable power. I just googled mine and it says it has full-range active PFC, automatically handling the input voltage range of 100V to 240V - though the grid here is 230V per phase so I should probably get a surge protector myself. Those are like 20€ new apparently. If you’re on a lower voltage grid like in the US and your PSU has a similar range, you probably don’t need to worry about overvoltage.