Comparison of power consumption, heating effects, and battery life for laptops with and without a GPU.
Comparison of power consumption, heating effects, and battery life for laptops with and without a GPU.
I own two laptops:
A) Dell Latitude 5500 - i7 8665U @1.9GHz - 16GB RAM - 512GB NVME SSD
B) HP Pavilion 15 - i7 1065G7 @1.3 GHz base frequency, up to 3.9 GHz - 16GB RAM - GeForce MX250 - 1TB NVME SSD + 1TB 5400rpm SATA HDD
Both are recent models from 2020 and run Windows 11.
I’m curious about their power consumption—specifically heating, battery life, and usage duration in similar settings (light desktop work).
Laptop A typically lasts about 8 hours or more on a single charge. It stays cool, operates quietly, and is comfortable to hold.
Laptop B performs poorly: battery life rarely exceeds 1.5 hours. Even when idle, fans run and it gets warm. It’s hard to keep it on the lap without placing something between it and your body.
This stark contrast seems unusual since both CPUs have similar power consumption ratings.
The SATA HDD likely isn’t the main culprit. The only notable difference is the GPU; I’m not using any games that heavily utilize it in this test.
To verify, I can dual-boot Laptop B into Ubuntu 20.04 and observe its power draw, heat output, and idle battery time. Any insights or suggestions would be appreciated.
The gaming version heats up a lot due to the GeForce graphics card. The HP laptop will consume the most power and operate at the highest temperature because of the graphics card and internal drives.