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Roman S.

Roman S.

Joined on 08/04/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 2
Most Critical Review

Working As Designed...who checked??

CyberPower CP550SLG Standby UPS Systems - 550VA/330W, 120 VAC, NEMA 5-15P, Compact, 8 Outlets,  890 Joules Surge Energy Rating PowerPanel
CyberPower CP550SLG Standby UPS Systems - 550VA/330W, 120 VAC, NEMA 5-15P, Compact, 8 Outlets, 890 Joules Surge Energy Rating PowerPanel

Pros: Light, compact for low loads.

Cons: Unit ran ~ 1 year supplying power to a router and 2 modems (~36W), which in my situation is critical because I have VIoP and Web through it. We did have a power outage and my 550VA went dead when I needed! It was the battery but no alarms nor notifications occurred prior to AC outage. So, before buying another one I decided to investigate the units functionality. After few measurements I am convinced that CP's design and validation is very substandard (perhaps on this unit), AND I will not be buying another unit from CyberPower. Here its why: 1. with a known-good battery (12V/5.5Ah) the battery backed AC side of the unit produces 102.7V instead of ~110-115vAC VAC and shorty drops to 97VAC; very unstable. 2. with fully charged battery ~14.2V, main AC removed, and ~36W AC loaded, the unit reports, through the USB software, ~5-7 min of run-time...really???? 3. Looking at CyberPower Personal Edition Status with battery disconnected and AC ON,the "Remaining battery Capacity " AND "Battery Status" shows 100% How could that be!!!?? However, this explains why there were no prior alerts from the unit. Removing AC power with bad battery has a predictable effect on the load. I would have attached photos of the set up and readouts but space/tool doesn't allow that .

Overall Review: none.

Experience with GA-MA790GP-UD4H

GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-UD4H AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-MA790GP-UD4H AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: This is my second Gigabyte board for AMD. The main reason I settled on Gigabyte is familiarity with the board/bios and dual BIOS and recovery; yes! Over all the board appears to be well manufactured, but considering the technology, most of the board mfgs will be of similar quality. The board came up on the first try with Phenom II x4 940Deneb 3GHz..just as expected.

Cons: To install XP, the board requires 1.44 FDD present and formatted disk with RAID drivers. Fdd not needed for Vista. The BIOS comes configured to SATA as native IDE. If you want RAID, you need to enable RAID in BIOS; not a big deal, except I could not get the RAID (0 or 1 or JBOD) to run (I am using 2 SATA Seagate 500GB drives). When RAID is enabled, Vista Ultimate loads but then it hangs..no progress, just a Vista screen. XP didn’t load either; received error unable to load setupdd.exe, error 7. Changed memory, changed BIOS, no go. Returned to native IDE and loaded XP/SP3 but no RAID!!!! Native Video, ATI Radeon is struggling with dual display (analog and digital). Extended desktop jerky when moving app from one monitor to another; The north/south bridge run hot..make sure you have plenty of cooling. This will be my last Gigabyte..last had Nvida RAID and I had problems with that.

Overall Review: System basics: GA-MA790GP-UD4H Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz Socket AM2+ 125W Quad-Core Black Edition Partiot DDR2 4gb; 1066 Pwr Supply (Corsair) 850W Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s -Note!!! need to remove a jumper on the drive to get the 3gb/s