Laptops come in a wide range of sizes and capabilities, and the power they consume varies accordingly. For example, a fully-loaded desktop replacement laptop with a high-end processor, discrete graphics, and a 17-inch screen may consume 150 watts. A slim ultrabook with an 11-inch screen, on the other hand, may use as little as 15 watts for everything it does.
I can say that a laptop typically consumes 30 to 200 Watts of power. It is based on the average wattage of laptops nowadays available on the market. They can vary depending on the individual computer’s model and make, as well as the hardware installed on it. Keep reading more to learn “how many watts does a laptop use.”
Factors Determining The Power Consumption of Laptops:-
The factors on which the power consumption of your laptop depends are:
The Efficiency of Your Laptop
The efficiency of a laptop is determined by the frequency of the CPU and the speed at which it performs. I play games after overclocking the CPU of my laptop for better performance, and I observed that my device’s battery efficiency drops drastically. It results in more energy consumption, which drains more battery life. A better CPU frequency means less power consumption, so it is essential to look for an efficient machine before buying one.
The Make and Type of Your Laptop
Many brands produce laptops every year while trying to formulate a reasonable machine that consumes less power and, at the same time, can be used for all purposes like video streaming, gaming, and high-end computing. Accordingly, your laptop’s power consumption is determined by its type. Similarly, the older models are not as power-efficient as the modern laptops, so they can consume more wattage for working.
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs)
Graphics cards are video memory devices used to render images and pictures. From this, it is clear that it must have higher power consumption. To play high-end games on Acer Aspire 5, I upgraded the Graphics card to get the maximum power from my device, but at the same time, its battery consumption skyrocketed. The high-end card results in better picture quality, forcing the device to consume more power.
External Peripherals
External or computer peripherals are external hardware pieces connected to the laptop to enhance its functionality, such as a mouse, keyboard, printer, etc. Similarly, for their functioning, these devices are dependent on the laptop’s power. So it is clear that laptop energy consumption will be higher if more peripherals are attached to it.
Display Brightness
Laptop screen brightness is set by the user and varies greatly depending on how the user has their machine configured. Typically it is less than 50% of maximum brightness, but it can be as little as 10% if the user has it set very dimly, so the average laptop wattage usage will be less without any doubt. I myself experienced this when I turned the screen brightness to 100%. Then laptop power consumption goes up.
Read Also: How To Know The Screen size of a Laptop Without Measuring?
Watts of Adaptor
Simply put, laptops with high-wattage adaptors consume more power than those with less.
- Mostly 15.6″ laptops come with a 60-watt charger
- Mostly 17″ laptops come with a 90-watt charger
We have noticed if a laptop has a high wattage charger, then it will have higher wattage consumption and vice versa.
Read Also: How To Screenshot on a Gateway Laptop?
How Many Watts Does a Gaming Laptop Use?
We all know that a game laptop is like a regular notebook. It has higher configurations that combine powerful components such as an LED display, more RAM, and high-end GPUs. Why not? A gamer needs a device capable of handling hefty tasks like image and video rendering, which can be done with top-notch components.
You can expect a gaming laptop to use more wattage for its functioning than a standard one. To estimate the power consumption of laptops for gaming, take a look at the wattage of their charger. Let’s take the example of the Acer Predator Helios 300, a popular gaming laptop. It comes with a 180 watts adaptor. You can deduce that this gaming laptop will consume 180 watts per hour when used.
How Many Watts Does an Apple Macbook Consume?
Every Apple MacBook user should know that the power consumption of a typical 13″ MacBook is 61W given on the charger. Whereas a 15″ MacBook consumes up to 87W of power in an hour. It will help you calculate how much cost you will have to pay for the electricity consumed by your MacBook per day or week.
You can calculate the power consumption of a 13″ MacBook as:
For one day = 61/1000 KWh × 24 = 1.464 KWh
How to Calculate The Wattage Consumed by The Laptop?
There are two ways to calculate laptop power consumption.
Manual Calculation:
You can easily estimate the wattage consumption of every laptop by checking out the adaptor wattage given on your laptop charger. However, if you want a precise measure, you need to consider more things in this calculation.
For example, Acer Predator Laptop has a 180 watts charger which means its power consumption could be at least 180 watts. Other than that, some components like the processor and graphics card can increase the overall wattage consumption by this machine.
Mostly, laptops are powered by either Intel or AMD processors. You can easily find out which processor your device is using by searching through the control panel or by manually checking the back case of your device. Once you know the processor loaded in your laptop, you can check out its wattage consumption on the official website.
Generally, the wattage consumption of graphics cards is 75-80 Watts and of processors is 45-50 Watts. These two components collectively can increase the consumption rate by 10 to 15 percent. It can be more depending on the type of components used.
Additionally, I noticed that using the laptop with maximum screen brightness increases the power consumption by 0.5-15 Watts, depending on the laptop model. Aside from these components, HDD/SSD and internal memory also consume wattage when the laptop is functioning, but it is negligible compared to the processor, graphics cards, and display collectively
Electricity Usage Calculator:
If you are not satisfied with the above method and want to know exactly how much wattage your laptop consumes, you can use an electricity usage calculator. You can utilize this machine over the laptop’s power socket to measure the accurate power consumed by your device.
The results will be undeniable because it calculates the power consumption through the power socket from which the power supply goes to the laptop. Other than that, you can use this device to calculate the wattage consumption of your home appliances as well.
How to Reduce The Average Laptop Power Consumption?
So what can you do to help decrease your laptop’s power consumption? Here are some mind-blowing tips you can employ:
Adjust The Brightness of The Laptop’s Screen
To save power usage in your laptop, you can adjust the display brightness to a minimum. For example, you will need less brightness if you read or work in a dimly lit room. The average laptop screen is at least twice as bright as necessary under most circumstances.
Get rid of CD/DVD Player/Burner
If you rarely use your optical drive for anything other than software installation, it is easy enough to install software from an external USB flash drive or an external hard drive. Removing the optical drive will save space and laptop weight and allow more efficient cooling.
Turn off Unnecessary Features
Turn off hardware features you are not using. Laptops come with many hardware features, such as wireless and Bluetooth connectivity, webcams, and speakers. If you are not using these features, then I would say you should turn them off to conserve battery power.
Read Also: How to Turn on a Laptop Without The Power Button?
Install Additional Memory (RAM)
RAM is like high-speed temporary storage for all the documents, programs, and files you are currently working on or opening on your computer. If the laptop does not have a sufficient amount of physical memory, then it will directly swap to and read from HDD. And we all know that a drive consumes more power than RAM.
Check For Viruses
Viruses run in the background on your laptop, wasting resources and possibly causing heat-related problems. Anti-virus software is no substitute for safe computing practices. Still, I will encourage you to use anti-virus software to detect viruses inside your system.
Close Programs You Are Not Using
It is better to close unused programs because they can use up RAM needlessly and slow your system down. By closing the programs and tabs on your browser, you can lessen the workload of the device’s memory. In this way, the battery consumption by the laptop goes down.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)-How Many Watts Does a Laptop Use?
Does a Laptop Consume Less Energy Than a PC?
A regular desktop PC consumes about 250-300 watts of power. A basic laptop consumes about 50-60 watts. This is because a desktop PC has more components that need to be powered. It has a CPU, but it also has extra fans, graphics cards, hard drives, and several other peripherals that are not present in a laptop. On the other hand, we know laptops are designed to operate with very little power as they need to be portable and run on battery.
Gaming Laptop vs. Standard laptop, Which Consumes More Wattage?
Gaming laptops are designed with the primary purpose of playing video games. They have powerful CPUs, a lot of RAM, and a dedicated GPU, which make them capable of handling 3D video games. All these heavy components are not a part of a standard notebook, and it is clear that they consume a lot more power. All in all, a gaming laptop is more power-hungry than an ordinary laptop.
What Uses The Most Power in The Laptop?
By far, the processor consumes the most power in the laptop. CPUs can use up to 80% to 85% of your machine’s power when under load. Due to this, even modest laptops have fans to keep them cool. It is hard to keep a chip running at full speed for long without producing a lot of heat that needs to be dissipated.
How Many Watts Does a Dell Laptop Use?
Dell laptops use varying amounts of electricity depending on several factors, including their physical configuration and model type. The higher-end models and those with discrete graphics cards use more wattage. We analyzed that most of the power consumption depends on the processor speed, the RAM loaded in, and the hard drive type.
Wrapping it up-How Many Watts Does A Laptop Use?
We have discussed earlier that the majority of laptops fall somewhere between 30 and 200 Watts in their power usage. The most efficient ones tend to be the ultrabooks, which can go for quite a while on less than 20 W. We hope that information below will help you determine how many watts a laptop uses and what to do about it if the number seems a little too high.