How Many Watts Does a Laptop Use?

In the current era, the usage of laptops has become a necessity. They are being used in homes, offices, schools, etc. People are using them for all the purposes, such as accessing their social networks, accessing their banking platforms, raising family budgets, making payments, watching movies, and finding every kind of online information.

But you know how many watts does a laptop use? As you are using it daily, you might have this question in mind or want to know the watts usage of laptops for information.

Whatever concern you have in this detailed article, I will cover how many watts a laptop uses and the factors the energy consumption of your laptop depends on.

How many watts does your laptop consume?

Discussing the importance of laptops, you might question in mind how much electricity a laptop usage consumes. There is no single answer to how many watts a laptop uses. While most need anywhere between 20 and 100 watts per hour, some laptops can increase to 180 watts per hour.

These variations often reflect the reason for the laptop’s use. Different needs require different hardware and usage. If you are a serious gamer or plan on using programs that need high-quality visuals, you can expect your laptop to consume more watts.

Energy Consumption of your Laptop

The wattage of your laptop, that how many watts a laptop is using, is a measure of how much power it needs. The more watts your laptop uses, the faster its battery will be drain. There is no single answer to how many watts a laptop uses.

The answer is very simple; a typical 15-inch laptop consumes approximately 60 watts per hour if you’re just into the numbers. But then, this is not the exact amount it would consume. Energy consumption depends on many factors that you may not be aware of. Such as charging, screen brightness, running software, graphics card usage, etc., are some of the things that may alter the power consumption.

Power Consumption Dependence of Laptop

So, the kind of laptop you have will determine the power consumption overall. The more external hardware you connect it with, the more power it will consume. Let us look at the factors on which the power consumption depends.

• Laptop Type [Gaming Laptops & Workstations Consume Higher Power]

One of the major factors that decide the energy consumption is the type of laptop you have been using. If you are using a very basic and general laptop, it will consume about 60 watts/hr energy. If it is a gaming laptop or any other high-end laptop, it will be much more than that. As tested in the labs, a few models can go a lot more than 100W per hour on average, which is why the laptop becomes very hot and needs a cooling pad to cool it down. Similarly, if you are charging such laptops, it increases even more.

• CPU

It is pretty much understood that a laptop with a very low-grade CPU or processor uses uploads of power than any powerful CPU such as Intel i7 or Intel i9 would use. The reason behind it is as simple as it may seem. The processor that may not be good enough will need more power to provide your laptop with good enough performance, while a great CPU works great in the small amount of power it consumes.

• Graphics Card

When there is a high performance of a graphics card, the laptop’s power consumption will be much higher. For instance, when playing a high-end game, the GPU in your laptop will provide better visuals. Most gaming laptops and workstations for tasks like machine learning and data science generally come with a high-end GPU such as RTX 2080, 2070, or 2060.

• Adapter Wattage

Most 15.6-inch laptops come with a 60W charging adapter.

Most 17-inch laptops come with a 90W charging adapter.

If your laptop came with a 60W adapter, then it’ll consume less than a laptop that comes with a 90W adapter because that’s the number of watts it’ll be spending when in use.

Electricity Consumption Components Of  Laptop

Laptops are built in such a way that the individual components work as energy-efficiently as possible, but at the same time, many functions and large computing capacities are available. Large consumers generally include the display and the processor. The main components of electricity consumption are:

• Graphics card
• Display
• processor
• Random Access Memory (RAM)
• Hard disk / SSD
• WLAN module
• Fan
• Touchpad

If a modern laptop with a multi-core processor is heavily used, the power consumption can rise to 60 watts and more. The graphics card is an important factor. The power consumption of laptops is significantly higher if one is installed, and the graphics are not only calculated via the main processor. However, a dedicated graphics card is built into high-end gaming laptops.

Variation in Number of Watts

Many people think that laptops from different brands will have different watts. However, even if you are using products from HP, Acer, Dell, they all have the same amount of power.

The number of watts varies depending on the configuration, graphics, etc. The higher the quality of these parts, the greater the power consumption will be. If the above models are just ordinary business laptops, the amount of power they use is about 60 watts per hour.

Paying attention to the number of watts that the machine consumes is essential. You can control the laptop charging time and the usage time after each battery is in a complete state.

FAQ(how many watts does a laptop use)

Conclusion

There are certain factors that most laptop users do not seem to be concerned about, or it isn’t something to be concerned about. If you are a curious person and have been trying to understand everything about the machine you have been using for years or want to figure out the energy consumption of the one you are planning to get, we will help you with it.

Gaming laptops often have apparent configurations and graphics so that the user experience is always guaranteed. Therefore, this product will usually consume quite a lot of watts. Specifically, the models will use from 70 – 120 watts per hour. Even models using high-tech graphics will consume more power than usual. For example, the most popular gaming computer series today, the MSI Creator 15M A9SD-044, this model can use up to 180 watts to operate.

Hopefully, after reading our article on how many watts a laptop uses, you can now figure out what your laptop watts usage is. Let us know via comment if you have any questions