 Welcome to my unboxing of a product that, if you guys are consumers, unless you are very high-end consumers, this may not be in the realm of sort of what you would buy, but if you're an SMB or if you are, once again, a very high-end consumer, something like this might appeal to you. So I've done a couple UPS unboxings in the past. On NCIX Tech Tips, we have done an episode about what is a UPS, what is the point. However, we're going to cover a little bit of that again, and we're going to cover a little bit of what makes this particular one special. So this is a UPS from OptiUPS. You can see it uses soft foam packaging, however, fairly hard soft foam because these things are heavy. They are serious business heavy because they have very, very heavy batteries inside them that keep your computer running for minutes at a time in the event of a power outage. So let's go through some of the accessories first before we get into a little bit more. We've got a phone line, so that'll prevent surges from affecting your phone. Serial cable in case you actually still want to manage your UPS via serial. We've also got their Sentinel software included, which is compatible with a wide variety of operating systems. We have a user's guide for the durable series, DS1000, 1500, 2000, and 3000. And let's go ahead and take this one out. So the one we have here is the DS1500B. It is, you know what, really heavy. Give me a sec, guys. So the DS1500B can run for about five minutes on a full load, assuming that you are actually pulling 1,050 watts from it at the time that the power fails or whatever else. So in the event that you have a very high-end gaming machine or something hooked up to it and you're actually doing something intensive, you have video rendering in the background while you're playing a game, you actually have a few minutes to close everything down and then you buy yourself a little bit more time in order to shut down the computer properly because when it's at a 50% load, it can actually run for about 15 minutes, about 14 minutes. So I didn't mention before, but 1500 volt-amps is basically equivalent to 1,050 watts. So unless you have a really high-end computer, this is pretty much gonna do it for you. It's also a double conversion design, which means that there is zero transfer time during your power outages, eliminating any possible downtime. Now let's have a look at the unit physically. You can see on the back we've got two groups of outlets. We've got a total of six outlets. We've also got a 15-amp circuit breaker. So in the event that you actually overload the unit itself, although I'd imagine... I mean, it's a... I guess if you're doing a peer pass-through, you could actually pull more than 15 amps from it, but 15 amps would be more than the actual capacity that it's able to sustain off the battery itself. So you wouldn't really wanna overload it any more than that 1,050 watts because you're not gonna get the benefit should the power actually fail, which isn't to say that you don't get any benefit from it if it doesn't provide a battery backup because this particular unit will actually clean the power that is going through it and can dynamically switch between battery mode, which would be online mode, and just a pass-through mode in order to make sure that if there's some kind of fluctuation... For example, if you guys know what a brownout is, that's where the lights kind of flicker a little bit because the electricity in your house just goes a little bit wonky. Maybe someone turned on the microwave or the clothes dryer, whatever the case may be, this will completely protect the equipment that is connected to it by dynamically switching what mode it's in in order to make sure it's as clean as possible. It also will correct the power going through it and is compatible because it is a pure sine wave unit with any devices, even power supplies that use active power factor correction, which is pretty much any modern power supply. You can see it has an LCD readout on the front as well as a couple limited buttons, not a whole lot here, just giving you indications of the major things that can go wrong with it. It has a dynamically controlled fan, so in theory it shouldn't get too loud, although this is a serious piece of equipment, and in general, when you get past the consumer level stuff, it tends to be not all that quiet. This is mostly recommended for use on things like servers, even medical equipment, boats, or like I said, again, very, very high-end consumer stuff. It also has an optional SNMP card available, so you can do network and remote monitoring of the UPS via a web browser, and check this out, emergency power out. It's taped down, so hopefully you won't accidentally hit it, but this will actually bypass any of the shutdown procedures that the UPS has if you go ahead and pull it out. We've got our serial port there. Remember it had a serial cable with it, although I definitely figured that for most modern systems you're going to be using USB, which isn't to say you won't use serial, because there's a lot of stuff that does still use serial as well. We've got our ethernet in and out, as well as, I think that's pretty much it for the back. So I was complaining it was heavy before, just so you guys know, it actually weighs about 40 pounds. It has some other pretty cool features, including managing the battery so it's at a 100% charge all the time, as well as managing the battery in the event that it's running off of battery mode, so if the power fails or goes completely haywire in some kind of way that would damage your equipment, it actually prevents the battery from going completely dead, which can damage it. Now I want to clarify something I said before, sorry I said online meant it was running off the battery, no, no, online refers to the instantaneous switching in the event that it does need to run off of the battery, so sorry about that. I think that pretty much covers everything that I wanted to say about this guy. One of the things that we're actually going to be using it for, on top of protecting our equipment here in the Tech Tips lab, is we're going to be using it to monitor power consumption when we do some of our videos where we're comparing the power consumption of various parts because the equipment that we've been using to measure it in the past has been pretty cheesy stuff, like 15 bucks at sort of the local Walmart kind of thing. So we're going to get away from that and we're going to start using this guy, or one of its younger brothers, depending on which lab we're working out of, in order to measure the power consumption that we're drawing from the wall. And the other effect that that will have is it will also clean the power it's delivering to the computer, so it'll protect us in the event of something like when we're flashing biases and we corrupt a bios, which we've had happen because the power went out while we were doing it, we like freaked out, fortunately the board had a bios switch, so we managed to salvage the board. It'll protect us from that, it'll make our equipment last longer because we're delivering more stable power to it, and it'll also give us better readings because the wall power can fluctuate, which will actually, when the voltage is fluctuated, it can actually affect the power consumption a little bit if the device is connected, because there's some wonkiness involved in the conversion. Because this is going to clean it and provide exactly 120 volts output at all, or 115 volts output at any given time, we should also get more stable numbers, especially when we're trying to do things like measure the idle power consumption or the load power consumption of a gaming machine. So thank you for checking out this unboxing, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos, and there's a couple things I forgot actually. It has user replaceable battery, there's an available extended battery, and in addition to the available extended battery, you can also run an external battery so you can power the equipment that is plugged into it for hours at a time.