Is it necessary or at least highly recomended UPS with a Desktop PC?

[Azurael]

Part me feels it is necessary to keep the system safe from power surges and data corruption when power outages occur. At the same time though my power supply is 850 watts and the UPS's that can deliver that incase of outages are rather expensive.

[LIGISTX]

9 minutes ago, Azurael said:

Part me feels it is necessary to keep the system safe from power surges and data corruption when power outages occur. At the same time though my power supply is 850 watts and the UPS's that can deliver that incase of outages are rather expensive.

You don’t need one most likely. Corruption is very rare. 
 

Also, you don’t need that large of a UPS most likely. At idle your PC is going to draw very little power, and if it dies while your gaming, you can very quickly shut it down so battery doesn’t need to last very long at full load…. Which is likely not more then 600 watts unless you have a RTX 4080 or 4090. 

[Poinkachu]

39 minutes ago, Azurael said:

Part me feels it is necessary to keep the system safe from power surges and data corruption when power outages occur. At the same time though my power supply is 850 watts and the UPS's that can deliver that incase of outages are rather expensive.

I use UPS mainly because 2 things :

1. I need time to save my photoshop/illustrator/design projects when a blackout / brownout happens.

2. I'd like to have my home internet up when a prolonged blackout happens, because my phone carrier's internet is shit & expensive.

Plus I tend to use AVR for expensive / sensitive electronics anyway due to shitty quality of electricity in my country (Before I started using UPS)

 

And as @LIGISTX said, you don't really need UPS that can provide wattage as much as your PSU capable of.

You only need one that can provide you enough juice to make you able to gracefully shutdown your stuffs.

Although it is a good idea to buy bigger than what you need so that the battery is hammered less (So that they last longer)

[Azurael]

26 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

You don’t need one most likely. Corruption is very rare. 
 

Also, you don’t need that large of a UPS most likely. At idle your PC is going to draw very little power, and if it dies while your gaming, you can very quickly shut it down so battery doesn’t need to last very long at full load…. Which is likely not more then 600 watts unless you have a RTX 4080 or 4090. 

What about tue through put from the outlet will all UPS's be able to supply the full wattage the PC needs even when the power is still on?

[LIGISTX]

9 minutes ago, Azurael said:

What about tue through put from the outlet will all UPS's be able to supply the full wattage the PC needs even when the power is still on?

When power is on, power doesn’t flow through the batteries at all. So yes, it would be fine. When the power is on, it’s basically just a very expensive surge protector. 

[DrMacintosh]

I don't have a UPS at my home desktop because nothing on it is important, all it does is play games. I do have a UPS connected to my Mac mini home media server though. Why? The Mac mini has an external drive enclosure in JBOD with 3 HDDs and an SSD totaling 21TB of storage. If a sudden loss of power were to occur, my HDDs could all head crash. I'd rather my server stay online and safely shut down without risking damage to my media collection. My router is also on the UPS so my W/LAN remains online incase I was transferring a file or was remoted into the Mac mini. 

[Arika]

My power used to go out no less than 15 times a year until I got solar with battery backup, never lost data or damaged components

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Unless you are constantly doing mission-critical things where you cannot loose any data or you're constantly doing BIOS updates, UPSes are rather overkill in a consumer environment.

 

If anything, putting a UPS on your home modem and router could be more beneficial than on your desktop. At least you'll still have internet during that outage. 

[HorseBattery]

My country has constant power outages, so I also have solar with battery backup (Bluetti EB150). It's cool having a PC that runs off sunlight.

[NobleGamer]

14 hours ago, LIGISTX said:

if it dies while your gaming, you can very quickly shut it down so battery doesn’t need to last very long at full load….

I believe that is incorrect, and this is exactly why UPSs provide a Watt rating:

 

If a PC draws more wattage power than the UPS is rated for (like perhaps when gaming), then the UPS will stop providing power to the PC and UPS will beep that it is overdrawn.

 

UPSs are not designed to handle power spikes above their capacity for more than some amount of milliseconds, regardless of how much power the battery can store. There is no way around this unless you know that somehow your PC could ramp down power usage (of your GPU no less) in mere milliseconds at a speed faster than the overdraw timing limit and as soon as the UPS detects a power outage.

 

In general, I agree with BlueChinchillaEatingDorito about when a UPS is useful, aside from regions with regular brownouts/power issues.

[LIGISTX]

1 hour ago, NobleGamer said:

I believe that is incorrect, and this is exactly why UPSs provide a Watt rating:

 

If a PC draws more wattage power than the UPS is rated for (like perhaps when gaming), then the UPS will stop providing power to the PC and UPS will beep that it is overdrawn.

 

UPSs are not designed to handle power spikes above their capacity for more than some amount of milliseconds, regardless of how much power the battery can store. There is no way around this unless you know that somehow your PC could ramp down power usage (of your GPU no less) in mere milliseconds at a speed faster than the overdraw timing limit and as soon as the UPS detects a power outage.

 

In general, I agree with BlueChinchillaEatingDorito about when a UPS is useful, aside from regions with regular brownouts/power issues.

I think you misunderstood, or I wasn’t clear. 
 

Yes, the UPS needs to be able to provide the wattage your PC will draw - but it doesn’t need to be able to provide that peak wattage for very long. My point was you don’t need to size a PSU to be able to handle your PC’s max draw for any more then a minute or two, just enough time to exit the game and safely shut down. That same amount of watt hours would power your PC at idle for 10’s of minutes, which is fine because the assumption is your PC will never be at max load unless you are physically sitting at it and able to react to a power outage, while at idle you may not be sitting at it or actively using it, and it would be able to last a while and safely shut down according to whatever perimeters you use in the UPS software. 
 

But yes, you are correct, the UPS would need to be able to provide your PC’s max wattage draw - just not for very long. 

[XNOR]

The usefulness of a UPS for consumers is inversely proportional to the quality of your grid. In some countries, outages are rare to the point of being effectively non-existent. In other countries, power may go out or dip multiple times a day.

 

So as so often is the case, the answer is it depends.

[Azurael]

2 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

If a PC draws more wattage power than the UPS is rated for (like perhaps when gaming), then the UPS will stop providing power to the PC and UPS will beep that it is overdrawn.

I have actaully seen this happen before.

[RollyShed]

Over the many decades of computer use, I've never had or used a UPS.

Do you need one? It depends on whether the country you are in is technically advanced enough to provide reliable power.

In my case, as batteries have a limited life, I'd have to spend a lot of money on batteries for no reason.

[Azurael]

3 hours ago, NobleGamer said:

I believe that is incorrect, and this is exactly why UPSs provide a Watt rating:

 

If a PC draws more wattage power than the UPS is rated for (like perhaps when gaming), then the UPS will stop providing power to the PC and UPS will beep that it is overdrawn.

 

UPSs are not designed to handle power spikes above their capacity for more than some amount of milliseconds, regardless of how much power the battery can store. There is no way around this unless you know that somehow your PC could ramp down power usage (of your GPU no less) in mere milliseconds at a speed faster than the overdraw timing limit and as soon as the UPS detects a power outage.

 

In general, I agree with BlueChinchillaEatingDorito about when a UPS is useful, aside from regions with regular brownouts/power issues.

I don't believe we have many if any brownouts in my area, but when the weather gets bad or we have high winds power outages become rather likely. To many power lines on poles in my area so when something effects them we are much more likely to have issues. Plus since I live in Upstate New York (not the city) we get lots of snow at times so that usually is not an issue, but if you know what snow is like you know it can get heavy.

[Sarra]

I got a UPS after a lightning strike took out a motherboard, back in 2010 or 2011. I built a new machine and it only ran when hooked up to the UPS.

 

That machine survived two lightning strikes, and many power outages. That was the first computer I actually retired because it was too slow, opposed to something died and it was easier to replace the entire thing.

 

I have, and always will, advocate for using a UPS. In fact, I have three. One for my gaming machine, one for my server, and the third has my network gear, monitors, and accessories plugged into it.

 

When our power went out in 2020 due to a massive arson fire that burned down 2,600 residential homes and businesses, our power was out. The county sheriff was able to call and leave instructions on the voip landline, but only because the phone/internet modem still had power. We would have evacuated, however, the sheriff's office issued instructions to shelter in place.

 

The UPS paid for itself, and I'm probably going to upgrade it to something massively overkill for the impending fire season.

[Azurael]

1 hour ago, Sarra said:

I got a UPS after a lightning strike took out a motherboard, back in 2010 or 2011. I built a new machine and it only ran when hooked up to the UPS.

 

That machine survived two lightning strikes, and many power outages. That was the first computer I actually retired because it was too slow, opposed to something died and it was easier to replace the entire thing.

 

I have, and always will, advocate for using a UPS. In fact, I have three. One for my gaming machine, one for my server, and the third has my network gear, monitors, and accessories plugged into it.

 

When our power went out in 2020 due to a massive arson fire that burned down 2,600 residential homes and businesses, our power was out. The county sheriff was able to call and leave instructions on the voip landline, but only because the phone/internet modem still had power. We would have evacuated, however, the sheriff's office issued instructions to shelter in place.

 

The UPS paid for itself, and I'm probably going to upgrade it to something massively overkill for the impending fire season.

Dude how the hell did you get so many lightning strikes? I am surprised that the surge from the strike did not fry the UPS and your PC anyway. Lightning strikes are capable of completely frying an entire houses worth or wiring and electrons easily.

[Sarra]

14 minutes ago, Azurael said:

Dude how the hell did you get so many lightning strikes? I am surprised that the surge from the strike did not fry the UPS and your PC anyway. Lightning strikes are capable of completely frying an entire houses worth or wiring and electrons easily.

Happens over time. We usually get dry lighting here, and I live in a house with 3 Giant Sequoia trees around it, including one right up against the room where my computers are. Over 20 years, yeah, we've had some impressive lightning here.

 

I think I have actually had a UPS go out from a lightning strike.

 

I also had a smoke detector go 'wheeee... poof' right above my head, right after it got hit by lightning. Blew a line of bark off the Sequoia on that side of the house, too, bark was all over the yard, roof, and adjacent trees.

[Azurael]

1 hour ago, Sarra said:

Happens over time. We usually get dry lighting here, and I live in a house with 3 Giant Sequoia trees around it, including one right up against the room where my computers are. Over 20 years, yeah, we've had some impressive lightning here.

 

I think I have actually had a UPS go out from a lightning strike.

 

I also had a smoke detector go 'wheeee... poof' right above my head, right after it got hit by lightning. Blew a line of bark off the Sequoia on that side of the house, too, bark was all over the yard, roof, and adjacent trees.

That reminds me when I was 12 a bolt of lightning split the tree about 15 feet outside my bedroom at my parents house. The thunder shook the entire house and the doggs were scared so bad they actually shit them selves. 

[da na]

On 5/11/2023 at 12:18 AM, DrMacintosh said:

If a sudden loss of power were to occur, my HDDs could all head crash.

Disks have not head crashed like that since 1982. 

Though, data in your write cache could absolutely get lost, therefore corrupting files.

[DrMacintosh]

46 minutes ago, da na said:

Disks have not head crashed like that since 1982. 

Though, data in your write cache could absolutely get lost, therefore corrupting files.

The point stands. I don’t have control over the behavior of my spinning rust, but I can ensure they don’t flinch when the power goes out and can allow them to properly spin down.