5 ms·
My thoughts exactly. When reading the title I thought "They do?" My laptop consumes the equivalent of approximately a single 60w incandescent lightbulb that u
by flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
My thoughts exactly.
When reading the title I thought "They do?"
My laptop consumes the equivalent of approximately a single 60w incandescent lightbulb that used to be required just to write on a pad of paper in the dark.
It's capable of quite a bit more than that, however.
EDIT: Updated power specifications to exact amounts.
- old-gregg 8y agoYour laptop consumes 200w? Maybe I'm not reading this right, but I have a modern 3.5Ghz/8-core server in the closet which runs a small army of VMs and its from-the-wall draw never exceeds 80w (about 35w on idle).
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y agoMy laptop is far from modern. It also has to power an old screen.
- oatmealsnap 8y ago200W still seems really high. A +10yo MacBook Pro used an 85W charger, and it rarely if ever reached that max. I find it hard to believe that even an old gaming laptop would require over twice that.
- ThrowawaySR 8y agoCan we please stop the guesswork in this thread, comparing gaming laptops to 10 year old MacBooks, and look at the data? Just shy of that 10 years, in 2009/2010, mobile Nehalem processors were introduced, and more importantly, early 2011, mobile Sandy Bridge arrived. Sandy Bridge was super powerful. How much powerful? 2 years, 2 generations before to Sandy Bridge: Core 2 Quad Q9000 (Q1 2009) -> i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) = +100% Sandy Bridge to 6 generations later, 6.5 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 8550U (Q3 2017) = +37% Yes, I'm mixing tick-tock cycles or low voltage with "standard versions". So let's see a more appropriate competitor: Sandy Bridge to 5 generations later, 6 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 7820HQ (Q1 2017) = +50 % So we had processors that doubled the performance in 2 years (and more than double if we disregard not-so-common Core Quads and take often only two-core mobile processors). Yet, 6 years later, there was only a 50 % increase. Until Ryzen came recently and made Intel to quickly come with Skylake-X, i9s and FINALLY, OH FINALLY, 6 (powerful) cores in laptops, there was no real performance reasons to upgrade, only for heat or thickness, those went down, performance didn't went up so much. So, around that 2011, those were that crazy times, when you could have: 45 W or 55 W CPU (i7 2820QM or 2920XM) 55 W GPU (Quadro 2000m) two SATA drives four DIMM modules In a non-gaming, back then "standard" size laptop (ThinkPad W520). And under heavy load, anything under Tjunction (say, 95 °C) was good enough. Some laptops with only a single 55 W dissipating fan (such as the ThinkPad W520) often throttled under full CPU and GPU load and couldn't run Turbo with full GPU load, others (such as Dell Precision M6600) had two separate fans and some even came with Quadro 4000m GPU with a TDP of... 100 watts! So, back then, those laptops ordinarily came with 170+ W power supplies (even over 200 W) and just a CPU+GPU could draw well over 100 W (add the rest of the systems, hard drive here, hard drive there, all four DIMM slots populated, charging the battery) and it would easily go over the twice of that 10 year old laptop with 85 W charger. And these are workstation models. If you mention gaming laptops, those sometimes had desktop CPUs in them and required 300 W PSUs. Nowadays they also use desktop GPUs and require TWO 300 W PSUs... Please, don't base observations on 10-year old Tick (probably Penryn?) with 85 W chargers, when 7-8 years ago, a Tock (Sandy Bridge) came with literal concrete bricks as power supplies and really pulled 200 watts. Thankfully, things got dialed back after that, but at the cost of performance until now and current mobile 6-core i9s and Xeons. And to the lap comments - you really didn't want to have those laptops in your lap when they were plugged in and turbo-ing...
- bunderbunder 8y agoWild guess - the disconnect here is that you're interpreting the maximum power rating of your laptop's power supply as an indication of what it typically draws. It's more an indication of what your laptop would draw if it were doing GPU-accelerated deep neural net training while recharging a completely drained battery, plus a healthy margin of error just to be on the safe side.
- orev 8y agoIf your laptop consumed that much power it would be too hot to use on your lap and also would probably damage whatever surface you put it on. Just because a power supply has a max rating of X Watts doesn’t mean it’s always using that much. Even then, 200w for a laptop is an enormous amount. Maybe you meant LED bulbs that emit the equivalent light of a 100w bulb? That would be much closer to standard laptop power consumption.
- noir_lord 8y agoIndeed. I have a Thinkpad that has an i7-7700HQ, that's a 35W TDP beast and even under very heavy load I still get 90 minutes out of a 72 watt-hour battery and it gets pretty warm (and the TP has excellent cooling), 200W would melt your legs.
- close04 8y agoI guess that's what active cooling is for. So your legs don't have to take the brunt of it. Anyway, a laptop's power consumption isn't concentrated in one chip. So combining the wider area that dissipates heat with the fact that hot spots are actively cooled means a laptop can easily go over the above mentioned 60W for prolonged periods. And power consumption tends to add up from sources that are otherwise not very power hungry themselves (compared to a CPU or GPU). A few W with the LCD, a few with the SSD/HDD, etc.
- xxs 8y agoIntel TDP is a sham - it's based on the published non-turbo frequency which is 2.8GHz. My primary laptop has its CPU undervolted (offset) by whopping 170mv, effectively around 30% lower power consumption.
- derefr 8y ago> If your laptop consumed that much power it would be too hot to use on your lap A lot of laptops do actually get too hot (and are too heavy) to effectively be used on laps. Some even require two concurrent power connections from two separate power bricks in order to charge!
- yread 8y agoyou will need to revise the power once more: when idle modern notebooks use 5-10 W, even under load it's closer to 30 W. These guys measure idle power consumption for all laptops https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Elite-x2-1013-G3-i5-8350U-SSD-3k-2-in-1-Review.336734.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Elite-x2-1013-G3-i5-8350U-S...
- yunong 8y agoYou're forgetting the vast network of much more energy-hungry computers your laptop is connected to.
- voxl_ 8y agoThe contrast! My laptop can consume as little as ~3-4w when I'm just scrolling a webpage.
- phyzome 8y agoI was going to say that you could write just fine by candlelight instead, but it turns out a candle uses about as much energy as that light bulb (based on random internet spot-checks).
- dredmorbius 8y agoThe increase in energy-to-services efficiency of lighting has been stupendous. If you go all the way back to brands or torches (the burning sort), candles, oil lamps, gas mantles, incandescent, fluorescent, and now LED. I have to keep reminding older concerned family members that a light might consume a dollar's worth of electricity per year, or that the bright overhead floods actually consume half the power of the 'low-energy' under-cabinet system (incandescent).
- phyzome 8y agoActually, thinking back on this, I need to do a different calculation. The candle is directly converting hydrocarbons into heat and light. If you burned those hydrocarbons in a power plant, how many watt-hours would be produced? (For that matter, how long will that candle burn for?) Ignore delivery/transmission costs: I'm curious what kind of losses there are in burning (say) oil for electricity vs. just setting it on fire, in the context of lighting.