Anyone here used APC Back UPS XS 1500 with a MacPro? Any good?

APC makes the best UPS' for home or business use. I have a slightly older RS-1500 for my MP and it works fine.

Power consumption varies depending upon work load and what's installed. Mine draws an average of around 150 watts for PS 1. I'm not sure about the HD-3870 video card but I think it idles around 100 watts and has a max of 211 watts. So total average consumption would be around 360 watts.

I have this exact UPS, the APC XS 1500, and have my 3.2GHz early 2008 Mac Pro with 4x1TB drives, RAID card, Dual 8800GT video cards, and when I lose power the Mac will stay up for about 8-12 minutes, depending on what I'm running at the time. I also have 3 Dell 23 inch monitors, but only 1 is connected to the UPS to minimize load. I have the USB cable attached between the UPS and the MacPro, so I get some stat's on battery level. I wish I could get some stats on overall power usage somehow thru the UPS. Anyone have any ideas of other utilities that I might use?

Hope that helps.

Yeah, mine is the older variety XS 1500 with plain beige front, no LCD readout. Hence the question. I'm looking for software that will provide greater detail on power usage in conjunction with it.

I have a APC XS1300 LCD and it works very well with my macPro. APC is a great company and stands behind their products. I have used their products for years.

I have XS and RS. XS is not sold by APC directly and only carried by 3rd party outlets.

Slightly different, (and APC has a knowledge base on the two but the URL is 5 lines long) the XS lacks an ethernet surge outlet, and you want your wired connection to have protection in front of the modem, plus before it heads into your computer's ethernet port or router/switch downstream.

We first debated this two years ago when Mac Pro came out, and before that when the G5 Quad came out. Generally a SMART UPS 1000VA or RS/XS1300VA. But looking at price, features, I think RS1500VA made the most sense, I later added one of APC's battery packs to add 60-75 minutes of runtime to cover most any situation... or to use when power is out and I need some power for household lights and such.

Hatter makes some great points here. Here's what I've done now with my older, 3rd-party retail outlet-sold APC Back-UPS XS 1500 (no additional battery hooked up, just the original it came with) :

1. Loaded PowerChute Personal Edition for WinXP on my VMWare Fusion XP vm slice, making sure of course to enable the USB port in the VM that the UPS is plugged into (I recommend direct USB connection, never thru a USB hub for a UPS).

2. PowerChute software is up and running, I ran the self-test to makes sure all is well (I've had the UPS for about 3 years, even though I've never loaded any software to monitor it). Mine is functioning properly.

3. PowerChute is really nice software IMO. It is showing that I am currently using 449 Watts of power! That is quite a lot, but considering what I'm running, not that bad actually. It is still only half of what this unit can do overall, though I would never want to tempt the upper limits.

4. Also, as I run more app's, taxing the RAID-enabled drives more, using more memory, etc., the Wattage increases. You can see this dynamically in the PowerChute Current Status area. As I've opened several VM slices (WinXP, Win2K3 Server, Ubuntu Linux, etc.) the wattage is increasing to a range of about 450-490 watts. My estimated Battery Time, given my current load, is 12 minutes. This is in line with what I've seen in a real world scenario, having lost power about a month ago for several hours.

Hope some of this detail is helpful to someone.

Cheers!