Did a UPS kill my MB?

[natsibley]

I've been running my i7 rig for about 5.5 years now. Never had any real hardware issues, power or otherwise. But we get power blips now and then, and I felt it was probably time to put a UPS on the system, save me some trouble and less chance of corrupting things. I've run it with a UPS before, an APC model a few years back, but it was old and the battery gave out. So I recently bought a CyberPower unit, CP1000AVRLCD. Hooked it up about two weeks ago. Then, two days ago, my machine stops POSTing. After going through all the troubleshooting steps (power straight from wall, try a different PSU, pull the motherboard out and try POSTing barebones), nothing worked. I'm RMAing the motherboard (thank goodness for that lifetime warranty).

My question here is, did my new UPS somehow cause my motherboard to go belly-up, or is this just a coincidence? How wary should I be of this UPS?

CPU: Intel Core i7 920
MB: EVGA 132-BL-E758-A1
PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX
UPS: Cyber Power CP1000AVRLCD
Got a bunch of drives in it and two video cards (GeForce 9800GTs), but never do anything too intense with it, average power draw was around 280W.

 

[bloc97]

That is very unlikely, since it would damage your PSU at best. The TX Series from Corsair is not bad, it should keep an constant output voltage of 12V to the motherboard.

Just to be sure, you can use a voltmeter and wattmeter to test the output of your UPS.

 

[natsibley]

That was sort of my thought as well. When the machine first died, my immediate theory was that the UPS might have damaged the PSU, but when a second PSU straight to the wall still wouldn't boot the system that put a pretty big dent in my theory. I'm having trouble writing it off as a coincidence though.

How can I test the watts? Wouldn't I have to be between the UPS and the device to test that? Maybe I don't have the right tool for that test.

I'll grab my multimeter and do some testing on the UPS, voltage-wise, though.

Any advice on testing the PSU? Same kind of thing, just testing the voltage?

 

[bloc97]

Unfortunally with only a multimeter you won't be able to test thoroughly. But if when the PSU is under load, and the voltages stay within 5%, it is fine.

When a motherboard dies, you should still be able to spin up the fans and get power to the components. It shouldn't just be idle.

For testing watts, you can get a simple watt-meter for 12$. It displays Watts, Volts, Amps and kWh.