How Many Watts Does a Laptop Use?

Geekyslug is supported by its readers. We independently analyze, test, review, and recommend the latest tech products—learn more about our process. When you buy something through our links, we may earn a commission.

It is no surprise that your electronic device is made for power consumption, whether a gaming laptop or an average day-to-day usage laptop. Nothing much to be concerned about but have you wondered how many Watts does a laptop use?

In this article, we will discuss everything related to your laptop’s energy consumption from scratch to have all the knowledge that will benefit you by reducing the average power consumption.

Energy Consumption in Laptops: The Factors

A typical 15-inch laptop takes about 60 watts per hour. With the development in technology, every other laptop manufacturer is trying to make a laptop that may save power and provide better performance for laptop users.

One of the points to be kept in mind is that a laptop has various parts that need power, such as the CPU, graphics card, screen resolution, brightness, and internet browsing. So it is essential to know about all the prominent reasons for laptops consuming watt per hour.

This power consumption may vary due to different factors contributing to it, so we shall discuss the important ones responsible for a laptop’s power consumption in general.

1. Laptop Type

This may play a significant role in which power consumption depends on when using a laptop. Now, suppose you are using a fundamental laptop or notebook for daily tasks like typing, attending seminars, or simply for entertainment and school purposes. In that case, you can expect the power consumption benchmark to be around 60 Watts per hour.

The opposite is when using a gaming laptop or a high-end laptop, which consumes more power than a basic one. This happens due to the need for battery power and processing speed for RAM and CPU. Some gaming laptops are known for needing more than 100 Watts per hour to function.

Gaming laptops are known to consume a load of power due to their need to run massive games smoothly and be connected to a power socket all day long.

2. CPU

If a laptop has a low-grade CPU/processor, it is pretty evident that it will not require much power to operate. One such model processor that works on the least power is the i5; compared to the other advanced models like i7 or i9, AMD ryzen 5 is known for its need for more energy to make the laptop run better faster.

In today’s generation, most laptops come integrated with a good processor, which most users look for in a laptop, especially when it comes to gaming laptops, so you can expect that a good processor comes with more power consumption.

3. Graphics Card

Graphics card plays a crucial role when it comes to power consumption for laptop use. The better the GPU, the more power is consumed by the laptop.

Most gaming laptops are installed with an integrated graphics card or a dedicated graphics card responsible for providing great visuals while gaming or working on visual projects. The GPUs that make the laptop consume more power are the RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 and the Nvidia graphics card.

Most laptop users can also expect a better CPU to support the graphics card, thus making the gaming laptop better in usage and sustainability. Such a laptop consumes a lot of battery and power thus requires more watts per hour to function appropriately without any lags.

Most budgeted laptops come with an integrated GPU that needs less power and is power efficient, making them an excellent laptop for power reduction and providing sufficient output to get your work done timely.

How Many Watts Does Gaming Laptop Use?

It is pretty easy to figure out that gaming laptops have been in high demand due to the increase of the release of new games every month in the market to keep the crowd pleased. Gaming laptops come with specific critical components required to work high-end games without any FPS drops or lagging.

Now, gaming laptops need to be working at their best levels to run games and suffice different tasks to give a basic idea of what is needed to maintain a steady power supply.

The drawback of such laptops is that companies manufacture laptops keeping in mind the needs and wants of a gamer. With their heavy build and packed components, the laptop battery is inferior, so you can expect your laptop to charge the entire day when playing games which increases the power consumption. As a result, overheating occurs, and a cooling pad is needed to keep them in check.

The best gaming laptop in the market in the budget we could find was the Acer Predator laptop which is said to consume 180 watts per hour. Another way to find the power consumption of your gaming laptop is to check for the charging adapter, as it will be noted on it how many watts the laptop requires on average.

How Many Watts Does an Apple MacBook Consume?

Macbooks surprisingly consume lesser power than most other laptops. Typically, a 13-inch MacBook consumes an average of 61 watts per hour, and the 15-inch Macbook is expected to consume around 81 watts per hour according to the adapter wattage.

With this presumption, MacBook users can easily calculate the actual wattage of your device as one full charge lasts up to eight hours of continuous usage, which makes the cost of electricity around 7 cents per day and a total of 49-50 cents a week which is quite efficient for the amount of battery these laptops consume.

Ways to consume Less Power on your Laptop

Suppose you have figured out how many watts does a laptop use to reduce your power consumption. In that case, there are great ways to prevent power consumption by maintaining an energy efficiency checklist. You may want to improve your laptop’s condition and for it to consume less energy and for this, we have listed down few methods you can follow to do so:

Never overcharge your laptop after it has reached the maximum battery capacity after charging as it may weaken the battery and thus increase power consumption.
Keep your laptop plugged off after it is fully charged.
When your laptop is at 10%, plug it in using a laptop charger instead of letting your PC die and switch off after battery exhaustion.
Use a cooling pad for your laptop while charging it to reduce overheating.
To keep power consumption in check, let your laptop cool down before resuming work.
You can replace your old CPU and GPU with an updated one to reduce the load on your laptop.
Use the original laptop charger for your device.
Adjust the screen brightness to reduce the consumption of energy more than needed.

How to calculate the wattage consumed by a laptop?

You may want to understand exactly how many watts a laptop consumes or the actual watts usage of your laptop. Now, we have listed down two easy methods to calculate the average watt consumption per hour: being it determined on your own or using an electricity usage monitor to figure it out.

1. Manual calculation

It is easy to calculate the approximate power consumption of any laptop by considering the power adapter used to charge the device as the watt consumption is generally written over it for the laptop model.

As mentioned earlier about Acer Predator Helios, laptop charger adapters can even provide a good power of 180 watts per hour.

Apart from the adapter, CPU and GPU are also some other components that consume more power for efficient work.

Nowadays, almost all laptops come with Intel processors, Nvidia, or AMD graphics cards. Their power consumption can be checked on their official websites or by opening your laptop and checking the watts consumed on the card and CPU.

On average, a CPU consumes 45-50w per hour and GPU 75-80w per hour. This duo undoubtedly increases the load on your laptop, and it needs more power to run.

Moving forward to the display, the maximum brightness consumption is about 0.5w – 15w per hour.

To make a simple calculation, assume your laptop runs for 8 hours and takes 60w/h power, converted to kilowatts is 0.06kWh, average energy unit cost is 12 cents/ kWh, so your result is 6.76 cents to run your computer per day.

2. Electricity Usage: The Calculation

For a better and more accurate calculation, we recommend you use an electricity usage monitor. You can easily mount the device on your wall outlet to automatically calculate the watts consumed when charging the laptop.

Being a versatile device, you can use it to check the wattage of other electronic devices at your home with ease. All you have to do is connect it to the socket you’re using to charge your device, and it will show you the result.

Generally, it reads 60w of the charging adapter before turning your laptop on to charge. It also helps you gain an insight into your laptop’s total energy consumption so that you can take easy measures to conserve power.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a laptop consume less energy than a PC?

Laptops are mini versions of PC with many components to work effectively, so they consume less power than a PC.

Even though an average working laptop consumes less power than a PC, many laptops consume more watts than mediocre ones.

Is the Laptop Wattage Differ for different brands such as Acer, Dell, ASUS, HP, etc.?

Brands do not affect the watt consumption of a laptop. If a laptop from these brands has a higher spec and better CPU and GPU, you can expect it to consume more power, but on average, the benchmark is 60Wh.

So, if two laptops of different brands have the exact specifications, they consume the same amount of watts per hour.

Gaming Laptop wattage vs. Basic Laptop wattage: Which is more?

Gaming laptops are made to end up consuming a lot of power compared to a basic laptop. Since their working supports high-end games, they are known as power-hungry devices, unlike a regular notebook to compare with.

Conclusion

In this article, we briefed the power consumption aspect of a laptop and discussed that, on average, a regular laptop consumes 60Wh of power to last for about 8-10 hours per day.

Apart from this, we mentioned the ways required to calculate watts per hour of a laptop and talked about a few ways to reduce and effectively conserve power without letting any electrical wastage happen.

We hope this article has helped you understand your laptop’s consuming power and accurately calculate precisely how much power it needs to run so you can come up with different ways to reduce power consumption.

Related Guides

How Many Watts Does a Laptop Use?