When it comes to buying a laptop, several questions come to one’s mind. One of the important questions is how many watts does a gaming laptop use?
Well, if you are concerned about the electricity that a laptop is consuming, we have come up with a detailed answer.
Just to give you a numerical idea, a 15-inch laptop uses around 60 watts per hour. But this may not be the exact ratio for all laptops.
The power that your laptop consumes depends on several factors, including – screen brightness, charging, graphics card usage, running software, and more.
In this article, we will discuss all these factors to help you choose the right gaming laptop. So, let’s take a look!
Before We Move Forward…
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Every year, a large number of brands manufacture laptops. Companies have been trying to create the best computer with the least amount of power but still working as well as any laptop you’ve used as we move towards better use of technology.
As a result, the power consumption of your laptop will be determined by its type. The more external hardware you bind to it, the more energy it can consume.
Let’s take a look at the variables that influence power consumption.
Factors that Influence Power Consumption
After numerically knowing how many watts does a gaming laptop use?
It’s time to know about the factors that influence the power consumption of a gaming laptop, so let’s have a look below to know these factors:
01 – Laptop Type
The sort of laptop you’ve been using is one of the most significant determinants of energy consumption. A very simple and general laptop can consume around 60 watts per hour of electricity.
It would be even more if it is a gaming laptop or some other high-end laptop.
It is said that some laptops can usually produce much more than 100W per hour and that is exactly why the laptop gets extremely hot and needs a cooling pad to cool down.
Similarly, if you charge those laptops, the cost goes up even higher.
02 – Central Processing Unit (CPU)
It is common knowledge that a laptop with a low-grade CPU or processor consumes more power than a laptop with a powerful CPU such as an Intel i7 or Intel i9.
The explanation for this is as straightforward as it seems. A processor that isn’t good enough would need more power to provide an adequate output for your laptop, while a great CPU works well with a limited amount of power.
03 – Graphics Card
The better a graphic card performs, the higher it consumes power. For example, the laptop GPU provides better results when you are playing a high-end game on your laptop.
A high-end GPU, such as the RTX 2080, 2070, or 2060, is standard in most gaming laptops for machine learning and data science tasks.
A laptop with a high-end GPU is likely to have a high-end CPU as well. In most cases, it also includes a higher-quality monitor and a larger battery capacity, among other things.
As a result, the total power consumption of all of them will be higher. In this article, we have a section dedicated to the power consumption of gaming laptops.
If you buy a budget 2-in-1 laptop or a budget model with integrated graphics, you’ll save money on electricity!
04 – Adapter Wattage
- 6-inch laptops usually have 60W charging adapters.
- Most 17-inch laptops come with 90W charging adapters.
Since that is the number of watts, it would spend while in use, if your laptop came with a 60W adapter, it would use less than a laptop that came with a 90W adapter.
05 – Random Access Memory
Ram uses electricity as well. When the RAM is being used heavily by multiple applications or services running at the same time, the device can be forced to destroy some of them on a regular basis.
Sometimes several times a second, restart them as soon as anything else requires it. That’s the problem with using many CPU cycles and, as a result, a lot of battery power.
Tips to Consume Less Power on Gaming Laptop
If you’ve already figured out how much power your laptop uses and aren’t happy with the results, you’ll have to come up with some creative ways to save energy.
Here are a few useful tips and tricks that you can apply to make your laptop consume less power.
- When the laptop is fully charged, don’t forget to remove the plug.
- Never charge your laptop extra because it will weaken the battery and use more power.
- When the battery charge exceeds 10%, plug in the charger. Do not wait for it to turn off on its own. This method necessitates extra effort, drains the battery, and consumes more energy.
- To keep the laptop cool when charging, purchase a cooling pad.
- Allow the laptop to cool down before restarting your work to reduce consumption.
- To prevent any device stress, update your processor and other hardware.
- Always use the original charger that came with the product.
There are a variety of other ways to use energy that you can pursue. The use of a high-brightness screen consumes a lot of energy.
You can prevent this by dimming the projector when it’s not in use, which will also shield your vision.
Final Thoughts
To sum it up – when a laptop is fully charged, it consumes approx. 60W power while when it is in use, the power consumption depends on multiple factors.
It is suggested to avoid using the manual process and better get a device that will tell how much watts does your laptop use? You can use the Electricity Usage Monitor to know the actual power consumption.
But if you are just curious without any particular purpose, just observe the timing, and you will know about the power consumption by your laptop.
We hope that you like this article and find it helpful!