Question Help with UPS selection

[vineethvg007]

Dear all,
I have the following setup, which I am using primarily for gaming. I run it approx 5-6 hrs daily.
There is a lot of voltage fluctuations, and at times while playing, the system just power down or restarts. I reside in South India.
I have my CPU connected to a UPS which is 1200VA input220VAC, 50H, 8A Max. ; outpuut 220VAC, 4.5A .
The UPS brand is Champion. though it doesnt justify its name when it comes to reliability, at least the unit i got.
Also, while the voltage fluctuates, the UPS kind of making blinking noises.

my PSU seems to ok , or thats what i think, cause if there is no fluctuations, i am able to use my system without any problems.

CPU : AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
Mobo: GIGABYTE X570 AORUS ELITE
RAM : 2* 8GB Gskill DDR4-2133 SDRAM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER
primary storage : 250GB HP NVMe 4x8.0GT/s SSD EX900
other storage : 500GB SATA Seagate 6Gb/s.
1TB SATA WD 3Gb/s.
Monitor : LG IPS fullHD 22inch.


I am a noob with electric stuff and wish to understand if its time for me to replace battery or the UPS.
if its a new UPS, could you suggest a model, or the specs please.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Pohemi]

edited to remove callout

 

[sdifox]

What you have is line interactive, means it only switches to battery when you lose ac power. For your situation you want an online ups, power is always converted to dc then back to ac, meaning you are always running off the UPS.

 

[bigboxes]

I have a CyberPower UPS that has AVR (automatic voltage regulation). It does what @sdifox said. It runs off the battery. It's not just blackouts (total power loss) that you want protection from. You more likely will experience brown outs (fluctuations in the voltage) on a regular basis (think flickering lights). Running your PC through your UPS gives you more stable power delivery. This leads to a more stable computer. My main rig has been up for almost 49 straight days now. Love it!

 

[Torn Mind]

India's grid quality is not great and what you need more is power conditioning.

A double online UPS would be the best of the worlds, but they are more expensive.

 

[mindless1]

Did this UPS previously work acceptably for your needs and if so, what has changed?

While the ideal is spend more and more for the more advanced UPS topology, if your computer PSU has sufficient reserve capacitance (a little over-spec'd for the system as most usually are), this type of line interactive UPS should work fine.

However it could have been damaged by a power surge or could simply have a worn out battery. How old is it and how often does it trip into a blinking light state? According to their website, a slow red blinking light indicates it is in backup mode (a normal state, what it's supposed to be there for, like if you suffer a brownout), but a fast red blinking light indicates overload or low battery.

Unfortunately it does not appear to support a USB connection to the PC, where software could show an estimation of battery life, the current AC mains voltage, and potentially log active events.

I don't know your market for available UPS choices nor your technical ability to troubleshoot. One method to troubleshoot would be measure the battery voltage when the AC mains cord is pulled from the wall outlet, whether it seems to run for an acceptable period of time approaching its specifications, how long until the fast blinking red, low battery light comes on, or another test would be to source a different battery, connect and see if the performance changes.

The typical way to determine UPS capacity needed would be either estimate peak load of components while gaming, or better to use a wattmeter at the AC mains plug to see all power draw including the monitor and go from there, including your needed runtime. Often a larger UPS is more about needed runtime rather than only peak wattage.

It could be unrealistic to expect to continue gaming during a power outage unless willing to spend a lot of money on the UPS to do so, unless you only need to continue long enough to save the game achievements.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Did this UPS previously work acceptably for your needs and if so, what has changed?

While the ideal is spend more and more for the more advanced UPS topology, if your computer PSU has sufficient reserve capacitance (a little over-spec'd for the system as most usually are), this type of line interactive UPS should work fine.

However it could have been damaged by a power surge or could simply have a worn out battery. How old is it and how often does it trip into a blinking light state? According to their website, a slow red blinking light indicates it is in backup mode (a normal state, what it's supposed to be there for, like if you suffer a brownout), but a fast red blinking light indicates overload or low battery.

Unfortunately it does not appear to support a USB connection to the PC, where software could show an estimation of battery life, the current AC mains voltage, and potentially log active events.

I don't know your market for available UPS choices nor your technical ability to troubleshoot. One method to troubleshoot would be measure the battery voltage when the AC mains cord is pulled from the wall outlet, whether it seems to run for an acceptable period of time approaching its specifications, how long until the fast blinking red, low battery light comes on, or another test would be to source a different battery, connect and see if the performance changes.

The typical way to determine UPS capacity needed would be either estimate peak load of components while gaming, or better to use a wattmeter at the AC mains plug to see all power draw including the monitor and go from there, including your needed runtime. Often a larger UPS is more about needed runtime rather than only peak wattage.

It could be unrealistic to expect to continue gaming during a power outage unless willing to spend a lot of money on the UPS to do so, unless you only need to continue long enough to save the game achievements.

If it's a power-outage, I wouldn't want to run my computer as if nothing had happened. My UPS's tend to be mostly APC. I've had CyberPower, Tripplite and Belkin. But I always seem to come back to APC. All of them, as I remember, have both single-PC and server software that will make your system shut down after a pre-selected number of minutes (3.5 minutes is fine with me) following loss of AC power. Letting them run until the batteries are drained is not good, and will shorten battery life. If I have a long power-outage -- it happens in So-Cal about every four years here -- then I have the extra task of running around the house to different PCs and their individual UPS's to stop the beeping. People are really annoyed with their UPS's beeping when AC power is down -- everyone tells me that. But given the number of systems and other factors here in our house, given the fact that long outages are far and few between, I'm OK with it.

 

[sdifox]

If it's a power-outage, I wouldn't want to run my computer as if nothing had happened. My UPS's tend to be mostly APC. I've had CyberPower, Tripplite and Belkin. But I always seem to come back to APC. All of them, as I remember, have both single-PC and server software that will make your system shut down after a pre-selected number of minutes (3.5 minutes is fine with me) following loss of AC power. Letting them run until the batteries are drained is not good, and will shorten battery life. If I have a long power-outage -- it happens in So-Cal about every four years here -- then I have the extra task of running around the house to different PCs and their individual UPS's to stop the beeping. People are really annoyed with their UPS's beeping when AC power is down -- everyone tells me that. But given the number of systems and other factors here in our house, given the fact that long outages are far and few between, I'm OK with it.

Most upses allows silencing the alarm by pressing the power button.