[timetopay]

fwiw a 320w cpu isn't running at 320w all of the time. if you're powering something off of batteries in a consumer situation, a 240w vs 320w cpu isn't going to move the needle unless you're really running it hard (like a game)

[TheCapeGreek]

The baseline draw is still much higher than lower spec alternatives, and it means you would need to cater for the high end scenario in your battery estimations if you intend to actually use it during power outages.

I switched from a 5950X + 3080, to a 5700G APU, to finally an M1 MBP + Steam Deck last year for this exact reason. Far cheaper to have a 250wh battery that can handle those two for the ±2h outages every day.

[wtallis]

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.