I'm in the UK and looking for a UPS mainly to protect my PC from the occasional breaker trip. The power is normally restored within a few seconds and would be down for a minute at most, so I'm not looking for long runtime. My budget is around £100, though I can spend more if necessary, and I'd prefer modern features such as AVR.
My system has a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, an undervolted RTX 5070 Ti, several M.2 and SSD drives, and one hard drive. The GPU usually draws around 180–200W, while the CPU is generally around 40–60W during gaming. I also have a 48-inch OLED TV and an older headphone amplifier that might be connected. I estimate the total load could be roughly 350–600W, depending on what is running.
Would a CyberPower UT1050EIG rated at 1050VA/630W be suitable, or am I cutting it too close to the UPS's maximum output? I'm planning to measure the real wall draw before buying, but I'd appreciate a sanity check on how much headroom I should leave.
2 Answers
Be careful with the estimated 300W figure: component and software readings often describe DC power inside the PC, while the UPS sees the higher AC power drawn from the wall after conversion losses. Your full gaming setup could therefore be substantially higher than the internal component totals suggest. A 500–600W load would put a 630W UPS very close to its inverter limit, where it may overload and shut down—the exact failure you’re trying to avoid. Use a plug-in power meter to measure the wall draw during your heaviest realistic gaming setup, then choose a UPS with comfortable headroom rather than sizing it right at the limit.
The 630W rating is the important limit here, not just the 1050VA figure. Your PC might be comfortably below that, but connecting the TV and amplifier reduces your available headroom and runtime. I’d leave the amplifier off the UPS, and ideally the TV too unless protecting it from abrupt power loss is important. A UPS designed for a brief outage doesn’t need to provide 50 minutes of runtime, but it should still have enough spare capacity that a gaming spike won’t trigger an overload.
The amplifier can stay off the UPS, but I’d prefer to include the OLED because I don’t like it losing power suddenly. Since the outage would normally last only seconds, I’m hoping that will be safe, but I’ll check the actual combined load first.
That makes sense. The GPU readings are measured, but the rest of my estimate was mostly based on typical component figures, so I may have underestimated the wall draw. I’ll get a power meter and measure the system properly before choosing the UPS.