We’ve all went through it: sudden power failures in a middle of working or playing on a PC and when you power on, something in your PC died. Heck in my experience, bricking a motherboard because of bad flash due to outage. Depending on the quality of the grid in your area, it may be normal or rare but still, it can and will happen. Sometimes at the worst possible times. Now any UPS can solve this issue, but what if you’re PC is highly sensitive to something called modified sinewave output from your UPS? No matter how big your battery is, if your device can’t tolerate approximate sinewave, its gonna behave really weird.
Working in IT, a UPS is definitely a must-have for equipment. I can’t have my workstations dying because of bad power of have some of the work force complain because of lost work due to power outage. But with work-from-home and freelancer becoming a more prevalent industry, I think its time for the general consumer market to realize how important a UPS is for the home especially for your PC. Of course laptops may not have this problem, but still, you may have still have a modem or router than needs some back-up power just to keep you working for a few minutes to save your work.
Going back to what we have for review, the APC BR1600SI, APC is actually marketing this is a gaming UPS. While its easy to dismiss that as marketing fluff, but its a little known fact that some ATX power supply design care about if your UPS outputs sinewave or quadrature sinewave. In the video above, you’ll see actual examples of a non-true sinewave entry-level UPS vs the BR1600SI which outputs true sinewave. We also noted the transient going from AC to backup power.
Watch as I share with you my thoughts as we test this UPS in our video review above of the APC BR1600SI by Schneider Electric featuring true sinewave output.