Laptops power usage mainly depends on its specifications and on the type of usage like doing normal tasks, playing games or running some heavy applications. Average power usage of a laptop is 50 watts but it can go upto 300 watts depending on the usage and specification of the laptop.

Moreover, there are some tools that can be used to measure the wattage of a laptop and along with that one must know which components of laptops use a major chunk of its power. So, this guide gives the details of the components that use a major portion of energy as well as also suggests a tool along with its method of usage to measure the wattage required by the laptop.

How many watts does a laptop use?

To check how many watts a laptop uses there are different devices available in the market and these devices can be used to monitor the power consumption of any appliance in your home. One of the best devices among such devices is Kill A Watt P3 P4400 as it is very convenient to use and is widely available in the market.

Below is the stepwise procedure to measure the wattage for your laptop using “Kill A Watt” tool:

Step 1: First connect the “Kill A Watt” to any supply socket and then plug your laptop charger in the socket of the tool.

Step 2: Turn on the supply and click on the button labeled with watt on the tool and it will show the watts that the laptop charger is using to feed the laptop. The reading will also include the power used by the battery.

Note: Don’t use this tool to monitor power usage for longer periods of time as it can get short due to melt down of its circuit board.

Next if you need to know that how much watts a laptop uses when the charger is not plugged in then look for the power rating of the following components:

• CPU
• GPU
• Battery
• Peripherals
• Fans

CPU

The main part of a computer is its CPU as it is responsible for performing all the tasks on the laptop and for that purpose it requires a lot of energy. Moreover, the peripherals connected with it like display, keyboard, trackpad also consume specific power to function properly. So, normally the power consumption range of processors varies based on their specifications, roughly the power range for low end processors to high end processors is about 40 watts to 105 watts.

GPU

Another major part of a laptop is its graphic card and again its power consumption depends on its specifications. If it’s a high-end graphic card like NVIDIA® GeForce RTX 3070 then it can consume up to 220 watts of power while gaming which is huge. Whereas some low-end graphic cards like Intel® Iris® Xe Graphic card can consume up to 25 watts of power. So, on average a GPU power consumption lies between 25 to 300 watts

Battery

One of the main differences between a laptop and a desktop PC is that the laptop has a battery which makes it work in standalone mode. Moreover, the manufacturers design the battery capacity normally according to the power consumption of all other components of the laptop. Similarly, normal laptops have smaller capacity batteries like Dell Inspiron 15 5000 has a battery capacity of 54-watt hour whereas the Dell G15 gaming laptop has a battery capacity of 86-watt hour. The average range of battery capacity lies between 50-watt hour and 90-watt hours.

Peripherals

Using different peripherals like external keyboard, mouse, webcam use laptop as their power source, though they need a little amount of power, but it does affect the wattage required by laptop to charge. On average an external keyboard uses 2.5 watts of power and an external mouse 0.5 watts.

Fans

Last but not the least fans serve the purpose of cooling the laptop so that it can function properly, since fans only run when the temperature of the laptop rises so they also don’t consume that much power. The average fan power consumption is about 2 to 3 watts which might increase while it is blowing fast.

Conclusion

The energy consumption of a laptop mainly depends on the power required by each component and from their power consumption, the watts required by laptop can be found. Moreover, there are some of the main components that make most use of the power of a laptop. So, this guide explains two ways to get to know how many watts a laptop uses: through a power measuring device and through estimating power consumption of each component.