3 ms·
For an ordinary consumer UPS that's not trying to keep the system up for hours but just a few minutes, the peak power consumption probably matters more than the
by wtallis 3y ago
For an ordinary consumer UPS that's not trying to keep the system up for hours but just a few minutes, the peak power consumption probably matters more than the average: a 750VA UPS might simply trip its overcurrent protection if you're unlucky enough to have a power outage coincide with a spike in system load. With a big enough GPU, even a 1000VA unit might not be safe.
And it might be hard to get your system configured to throttle itself quickly enough when the power goes out: having the UPS connected over USB to a userspace application that monitors it and changes Windows power plans in response to going on battery could be too slow to react. It's a similar problem to what gaming laptops face, where they commonly lose more than half of their GPU performance and sometimes a sizeable chunk of CPU performance when not plugged in, because their batteries cannot deliver enough current to handle peak load.