UPS - Simulated vs. Pure Sine Wave

[Deleted whining member 223597]

So it seems like the power likes going out in my room whenever there is a thunderstorm, but it's only for a second or two and that of course shuts down the PC instantly. A UPS should help solve that problem, but it seems like there's tons of conflicting information on pure vs simulated sine wave with an active PFC power supply. My PSU is a Silverstone Strider Gold 750W, so it has active PFC and I'm wondering if a simulated sine wave UPS would be fine. There's a roughly $60 difference between the active and simulated UPS I am looking at. (Cyberpower 900W/1500VA)

 

[michalrz]

So it seems like the power likes going out in my room whenever there is a thunderstorm, but it's only for a second or two and that of course shuts down the PC instantly. A UPS should help solve that problem, but it seems like there's tons of conflicting information on pure vs simulated sine wave with an active PFC power supply. My PSU is a Silverstone Strider Gold 750W, so it has active PFC and I'm wondering if a simulated sine wave UPS would be fine. There's a roughly $60 difference between the active and simulated UPS I am looking at. (Cyberpower 900W/1500VA)

I waited a while to see if someone more knowledgable will pop in.
A 12 hour grace period expired so let me chime in.
Personally I went with a true sine wave (while on battery) unit in my work server room. It's quite a big unit, 1400 real Watts. I have three weaker servers on it, CCTV, and the router, switch and threat management device. I did so because I had a mixed environment of Active PFC supplies and regular switch mode ones. It is a Lestar unit, a non-US company. Has been going strong for 2 years now without a single shutdown/brownout.
I had once used a non-sine unit for some audio recording equipment (condenser microphones, an amped mixer, CCTV) and it would develop a serious buzzing problem while on battery power.
Once I placed a sine wave unit instead, the problem went away and the recordings are crystal clear and there is not a single pop or click when it switches from mains to the battery.
I remember reading a JonnyGURU thread somewhere sometime about this problem and basically he said IIRC there were no reported failures and recommended getting a square wave one instead of none at all.
And this is where I admit I no longer have a clue. I can't speak about PFC circuitry because I haven't learned that yet.
I'm quite certain you will not in any way harm your gear, but the efficiency might drop, but considering the rating of both the UPS and the PSU it should still sustain.

 

[LFaWolf]

I can only speak to what I have/know, I have a APC Backups 1500 and I have tested it by loading the GPUs and unplug the UPS, and it worked fine (supplying the power). My PSU is an Corsair AX 850. Honestly I think any UPS is fine, if your PSU is fairly recent and updated.

 

[CVNet1]

If you frequently have power loss to your room / power surges / brownouts, then you would probably want to go with an Online, Pure Sine Wave UPS to eliminate the chance of your PC losing power. A truly online UPS is always powering your devices from the battery and the wall power is always recharging the battery, so if wall power is lost, then there is no switching to battery as you are already using battery. Things just keep on working exactly as they were when the power was on. Active PFC (Line Interactive) does condition power, so if you have brownouts, it will be able to up the voltage (by pulling more amperage from the wall circuit to do this), and it usually corrects by a set percentage within certain bands of voltage drop at the wall. If voltage drops below the threshold level for Active PFC (or if power just plain goes out at the wall), then the UPS will switch over to battery. The catch here is that the UPS switching over to battery has a slight delay (Transfer Time). For instance, Cyberpower Active PFC UPS's advertise a 4ms delay. Additionally, Active PFC power supplies are not always completely compatible with sensitive electronic equipment and high performance power supplies which can lead to power cycling during switch over to battery power, or just flat refusal to operate under the simulated sine wave.