Uninterruptible Power Supply beeps after playing MHW for 10-15 mins?

[warymonkey]

Hello,
My UPS beeps after playing this game for a while. It is like when I play MHW, my PC drains away the UPS battery first instead of drawing power from the outlet. If I let it beeps and keep playing the game, PC will shut down abruptly eventually. As far as I played games in my PC, this doesn't happen in other games that I played.

I know, I can just disconnect the UPS and plug my PC directly to power outlet, but it's just frustrating knowing my PC is prone to blackouts (Power grid blackouts are common in my area). I have tried lowering the Graphics Setting to low only to get more minutes of playtime before the beeps.

So, anyone here have the same problem as mine? Do you have solution for it? Please let me know! Thank you.

P.S. The UPS beeping was the "low battery indicator" beeps.

[Ancient]

It sounds like what you're asking is "When the mains supply is operating normally, why doesn't the UPS supply power to the load directly from the mains?"

It's because that is not how UPS systems work. Instead, a UPS almost invariably continues to supply power to it's outputs from the battery via the inverter, while keeping the battery charged from the mains.

This sounds unnecessary, to use the battery even when the mains is working normally, but there are a couple of good reasons that justify this:

Firstly, the inverted supply from the battery is a form of power conditioning. Why is power conditioning important? Because power anomalies from the utility can diminish performance and cause interference. Power conditioning acts as a buffer to interference and smooths out potential power fluctuations before passing it to your devices. It is important to note that only a true online, double conversion UPS will protect against all nine possible power anomalies. Those are:

• Power Failure: Total loss of utility power.
  
• Power sag: Short term low-voltage issues. This is similar to a person being sleepy after lunch time.
  
• Power Surges or Spikes: Short-term high voltage that’s more than 110% of normal output. This is similar to a caffeine high in a person.
  
• Under-voltage (brownout conditions): Reduced line voltage for an extended period. This can be a few minutes to a few days. This commonly happens during summer months when air conditioners put strain on the power grid.
  
• Over-voltage: Increased line voltage for an extended period from a few minutes to a few days.
  
• Electrical line noise: A high power frequency wave caused by RFI or EMI.
  
• Frequency Variation: A loss of stability in the power supply’s normal frequency of 50 to 60 Hz.
  
• Switching Transient: Instant under-voltage in the range of nanoseconds.
  
• Harmonic Distortion: Distortion of a normal power wave, typically transmitted by unequal loads.

So by always supplying power via the battery the UPS isolates the load from all these kinds of mains interference. In fact many people don't realize that this is the primary benefit of using a UPS in in the first place. Mains power failure is often very rare, but spikes causing equipment glitches can be a significant issue which the UPS prevents. In fact many server manufacturers recommend you use a UPS primarily because then the server has fewer reliability issues due to this isolation that a UPS provides.

Secondly, if the UPS switched the load directly to the mains when the mains is present, then on mains failure the UPS would need to reliably and instantaneously detect the failure and switch the load to the battery. This is almost impossible to do without a some disturbance to the supply to the load. Supplying the load permanently from the battery avoids this problem entirely which is why it is a standard feature in UPS systems.

Thirdly, the VRLA batteries used in UPS systems are lead-acid batteries similar to those used in automobiles. Anyone who has left a vehicle sit unused can tell you what happens to lead-acid batteries when they are not put through a discharge/charge cycle on a regular basis: they fail. If a UPS system were to only use it's battery when the mains suffers a failure, that is an unknown variable amount of time and it could be days, weeks or months that go by where the battery is not put through a discharge/charge cycle and when the time comes that it is needed it becomes much more likely that it would fail.

A higher-end commercial UPS may still have a bypass capability, but this is only used as a resilience mechanism if the UPS detects a fault in the inverted supply to the load. Bypasses affect efficiency and battery life negatively and so are not commonly needed or desired.

In short, your UPS will always use the battery to feed the inverter, which feeds your load devices (PC, monitor etc. whatever you have plugged into it) while the battery is simultaneously being charged by the mains. This is analogous to how an automobile's entire electrical system is run from the battery while the engine's belt system is used to crank the alternator which is then recharging the battery simultaneously while the vehicle is running.

Just to give you an example, my gaming rig has these specs:

i7-6800K OC'd to 4.2GHz
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW OC'd to 2025Mhz core / 5636Mhz mem
32GB TridentZ 3200MHz CL16 DDR4 running at XMP voltage of 1.32V
Corsair RM850x PSU
NEC PA302W-BK-SV 30" 16:10 IPS Monitor

When I measured my PC's draw at the wall under what I consider a full load (Prime95 small FFT to stress CPU + Furmark 4K to stress GPU simultaneously) the PSU is pulling 573-584W from the wall.

When I measured my monitor's draw at the wall, it is using 86W.

Those are the only devices I plug into my UPS with total max draw of 670W. The UPS I chose to power them is an APC Back-UPS Pro 1500 (Model BR1500G) with an additional APC Back-UPS Pro External Battery Pack (Model BR24BPG). That UPS is capable of providing 865W maximum and my PC and monitor (at worst) will pull 670W so my devices are only using around 77% of the UPS's capacity. When the power goes out completely, the UPS could provide power to the PC under full load for around 28 mins (or roughly halved at 14 mins without the external battery).

Your issue is that the load being drawn when playing MHW is higher because the game is pushing your hardware harder than other games do and it is therefore using more overall wattage than the UPS can provide and replace via it's own charging system. Typically, this is a sign of one of two issues with the UPS:

1) The UPS's battery is 3-4 years old and needs replaced. An old battery at the end of it's life will have diminished output VA/W capacity, may charge slowly or incompletely due to failed cells within the battery or suffer from both symptoms.

2) The UPS itself is not capable of providing the necessary capacity to power your load devices under full load and you need a higher capacity UPS that can provide the necessary wattage you're using.

I suspect that you may be looking at #2: pulling more wattage under a full load condition than you expect and it is surpassing the rated wattage of your UPS. I suspect that because most all UPSs out there do a bi-weekly battery test and it would likely alert you if the battery were failing.

[warymonkey]

Whoa, I didn't expect this long respond. Thank you for your answer, Ancient. I will try to respond with my capacity.

First, thank you for your explanation about how UPS works. It gave me some understanding on how my UPS works now.

Second, my UPS is still considerably new. About a little more than 1 year I have been using it now, although it got me wondering. The UPS I've bought has 1200VA written on it. For my PC, I am using:

i7-4790
Aorus GTX 1080Ti not OC'd
16GB Corsair DDR3 Vengeance 8GB kit
CoolerMaster MasterWatt Lite 600W.

So, I thought it got enough power for at least my PC, right? Is it possible that faulty electrical wiring in my house is somehow causing all this? I saw a response to a question similar to mine in a forum.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/ups-beeps-while-playing-games-at-high-settings.1279141/

In the last response, Bullet1993 said it was not their UPS fault. They said the problem lies "outside". Is it possible they are referring "outside" as their electrical wiring? Thank you.

[Corrodias]

A 1200VA unit is not huge, maxing out at probably 800 Watts of output, which a gaming PC could reach. A GTX 1080ti runs 250 W, there's an i7 about 100 W, there are the motherboard and disks, and you've also got the monitors and possibly a sound system, depending on how you've got it hooked up. Apparently your UPS can output as much as you're asking of it but is unable to charge the battery quickly enough to keep up. :(

[warymonkey]

Nope, neither my monitor nor my speaker is going through the UPS. PC only. Yes, apparently my UPS cannot keep up with the discharge rate. :(

[Corrodias]

It's kind of weird, but it's the only plausible explanation. Unfortunately, you just have to get a bigger one, preferably from a company that doesn't fudge their specs.

[warymonkey]

OK. Thanks for the response.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by warymonkey:

Hello,
My UPS beeps after playing this game for a while. It is like when I play MHW, my PC drains away the UPS battery first instead of drawing power from the outlet. If I let it beeps and keep playing the game, PC will shut down abruptly eventually. As far as I played games in my PC, this doesn't happen in other games that I played.

I know, I can just disconnect the UPS and plug my PC directly to power outlet, but it's just frustrating knowing my PC is prone to blackouts (Power grid blackouts are common in my area). I have tried lowering the Graphics Setting to low only to get more minutes of playtime before the beeps.

Brownouts too apparently. You just have a poor electric grid, not much you can do about that.

[warymonkey]

So, brownouts can be a possible cause of this problem, right? Thank you.

[Corrodias]

Yeah, naturally, if your PSU is getting less than the 115 V it should be, it won't be able to charge as quickly as it should. I didn't think of that. You'd notice your lights dim considerably, right? That sometimes happens here, but only for a couple of seconds.

[warymonkey]

Aaah, you're right. I live in 220v country supposedly, but when I checked the voltage it is around 196v. Thanks for the info! I will try to contact the electrician here.