Need a UPS for my desktop/workstation

[Anonymous user]

I've been having power failures everyday for about 30 minutes thrice a day. I really need to invest in a good UPS. I am from India and was using an 800va UPS by Microtek on my old hardware which has failed to provide any backup now and I want to invest in a good UPS. The problem is that I cannot figure out how much of backup power I would need to keep my desktop running for about 15-30 minutes. I tried using the APC UPS selector but most of the components that I have are not listed there. I am listing my computer configuration here so someone in the community could help me out :

Power Supply Unit (PSU) - 850 watts

Processor (CPU) - Intel Core i7 4790k

Hard drives (HDD) - 1 TB 7200 RPM drives x 4

Graphics Card (GPU) - Nvidia Gtx 1070 (150 watts TDP). I might add an additional GPU in the near future

Monitor - 24 Inch Dell LCD (not sure about the power draw). Might add another monitor soon.

Might also add a PS4 to it later

I might add a few peripherals here and there so want to have some buffer. The only purpose for the UPS would be to be able to save my data in case of a power cut. The reason why I want a 15-30 minutes backup is because I am a 3d artist and render a lot of stuff. At times during a render, my computer freezes while the processor works so I would like to give it time to render stuff before I can save my work.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Brad_C · Accepted solution]

The important question is what is the consequence of a hard power off for you and how much might it cost you to recover from it?

You could be looking at up towards a 500W load if you have a pair of GPU's and a CPU all going flat out, plus other misc draw & monitor.

If you are having 3 30 minute outages a day, you are going to be hammering your UPS batteries so you will have a choice. Buy an appropriately sized UPS and prepare to replace the batteries yearly, or buy a much oversized UPS to get a longer battery life. Checking out a representative battery chart (because I happen to have it open already) for a Vision 6FM55X battery, you'll get about 200 cycles out of a complete discharge, 500 cycles out of a 50% discharge and 1300 cycles out of a 30% discharge.

Those lifetime figures are based on the batteries properly charging after an outage. Most APC UPS can get the batteries back to about 90% in a couple of hours, and they read 100% after a couple more. The problem is sealed lead acid batteries actually keep charging for upwards of 20 hours to reach a full charge, and if you don't give them time to do that you'll suffer reduced lifespan due to sulfation. So your use case is going to be quite hard on batteries.

If it were me, I'd be aiming at a UPS with about a 2 hour holdup at 500W. That's probably going to need a SmartUPS and external battery. If it were me I'd be looking at a 2200 or 3000 UPS with enough extra battery to give me a couple of hours runtime at your full load.

Unless you start looking at creative (and unsupported) solutions, it's not going to be cheap if you are buying new. Having said that, if you are losing thousands of dollars worth of work in a crash, then it becomes very easy to justify.