APC UPS, 600VA UPS Battery Backup & Surge Protector

I have a very old (10+ years) APC 500VA/300W UPS that wasn’t working anymore. When power is lost, it wouldn’t switch over to battery power anymore to keep my devices running. Everything would just turn off and I’d get a noisy alarm sounding from the UPS. So I bought this new 600VA/330W unit to replace it. Right away I noticed that the battery pack is smaller on this one compared to the old one. Odd, since this one has a 20% higher VA rating than my old one. I wouldn’t expect improved efficiency in the circuitry to explain that since it’s still the same lead acid battery tech. I looked over the factory test report that was taped to the outside of the UPS. Test date was from 4/4/21. Today is 2/25/22, so it was built almost 11 months ago. After connecting the positive battery terminal, I plugged it in, pressed the power button, and it immediately started sounding a constant alarm and flashing alternating red/green lights. The manual suggests this alarm indicates the battery is either not connected or needs to be charged. I checked the software on my connected computer and it reports the battery is at a little below 50% capacity and is charging. The alarm stopped sounding and the light stayed solid green once the charge went above 50%. Note that the alarm doesn’t sound if plugged in but the power button is turned off. After about 5-10 minutes, the alarm finally stopped going off. I guess I’d recommend plugging this in for a while to charge the battery first before turning it on and plugging devices into it. After finally getting the alarm to shut up, I fired up a game (Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries). As soon as the game starts taxing my graphics card, it pushed the power meter in the UPS software running in background on my second monitor to its max rating (330W for this model). An amber light came on the UPS and again with the loud constant alarm. Odd. My old APC unit with lower VA and wattage ratings didn’t complain when running all the same devices and running the same game. This seems to be an “improvement” to the newer design to protect the hardware from being overloaded, I assume. I should note that the manual didn’t specify what this alarm signal meant. I had to deduce it by observing the power meter and reproducing what things triggered it. Seems pretty clear it’s a system overload warning. Frankly, I’m surprised it didn’t just power itself off after alarming for a minute or two. It just kept my PC running, but it certainly let you know it did not like it. If they’re really worried about the overload condition and want to prevent hardware failures, it really should just shutdown and then flash a code. I went to the APC software settings and there is an option to disable alarms, so I tried turning that on. The UPS still sounded the alarm anyway when trying to run my game on my PC. With no way to disable the alarm, it looks like this UPS will get moved to my bedroom and I’ll use it for my new TV which is currently just plugged into a crappy power strip. I’ll need to find something with a much larger power rating to handle my PC. I would guess this would be fine for most laptops, though, as they generally consume a lot less power than a desktop gaming PC does. In hindsight, this probably explains why my old battery backup failed, after being overloaded regularly for years and me not paying attention to the wattage rating on my old UPS. My PC isn’t even a super-powered machine. It’s only a 450W power supply running the machine and I’m only drawing around 400W on it. Some gaming machines have 1000W power supplies running in them! Obviously, 400W+ whatever the monitors, speakers/amp, and WiFi router draw is well above the 330W rating on this device. That’s my fault and I should have checked the rating on this UPS before purchasing.