In the past, gaming laptops would last anywhere from two to four hours on a single charge — a woefully short duration compared to their non-gaming counterparts. Powerful hardware like heavy-duty graphics cards requires a lot of energy to run, thus draining the battery.
But trends have changed in recent years thanks to advances in cooling technology, more power efficient hardware, and battery saving software. Nowadays, you can easily score a gaming laptop that lasts a full workday. Let’s dig into the details of these welcome improvements.
Further reading: Best gaming laptops 2024: What to look for and highest-rated models
Why do gaming laptops have better battery life now?
The first thing you need to understand is that gaming laptops need a lot of power to run higher-tier hardware and those parts generate a good amount of heat, which can further decimate battery life. That’s where a good cooling system comes in.
A good cooling system should include high-quality fans (for moving air around), heat pipes (for moving heat away from important hardware), heatsinks (for dispersing heat), air vents (for proper airflow), thermal paste (for dissipating heat), and vapor chambers (for spreading heat across a larger area). The more fans, vents, and heat pipes you’ve got, the better the battery life.
A vapor chamber, which came onto the scene in 2018, is especially useful for keeping things nice and cool and also preserving battery life. Essentially, it’s a sealed chamber that’s filled with a bit of liquid. When heat from the CPU comes into contact with the vapor chamber, the liquid inside evaporates and absorbs the heat. Pretty cool, right? Heat pipes work in a similar fashion.
These copper tubes contain liquid that boils and evaporates. This vapor then travels to the cooler end of the pipe, drawing the heat away from the CPU and GPU. For the visual learners among us, check out the video below.
In addition to advances in cooling systems, processors are more efficient than they’ve ever been. The Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor (aka Meteor Lake), for example, has a base power consumption of 45 watts, which means it’s designed to work at a lower power level. A power-efficient CPU typically falls in the range of 35 to 65 watts, by the way. It also comes with six performance cores (for more demanding tasks) and eight efficiency cores (for lighter workloads).
There’s also Nvidia’s Battery Boost technology, which improves battery life by equalizing the power usage of the CPU and GPU. This feature will automatically turn on when the laptop is unplugged and, whether you’re in a visually demanding cut scene or just idling in the game world, it’ll compensate by balancing out the power draw. The idea is to save energy, more or less.
Laptops that exemplify this trend
PCWorld has reviewed a number of gaming laptops this year, some of which exhibit surprisingly good battery life. The first (and more affordable) option is the Acer Nitro 14, which suspended at the nine hour mark during our battery benchmark, where we run a 4K copy of Tears of Steel on repeat in the Movies & TV app on Windows 11 with airplane mode turned on. We also decrease the screen brightness to 250 nits. That’s more than a full workday, an impressive result compared to the more anemic scores of the past.
The reason behind the Acer Nitro 14’s long battery life is likely its robust cooling system. It has two fans, two long heat pipes that encircle the CPU and GPU, one pipe that’s solely dedicated to the graphics card, four heatsinks, and two heat spreaders.
The pipes are filled with a liquid (typically deionized water) that transfers heat from the processor to the heatsinks, and the spreaders are metal plates that sit on top of heat-generating components (like the GPU or CPU) — these increase the surface area for better heat distribution. The dual fans also expel hot air out the sides of the laptop.
The Alienware x16 R2 is another gaming laptop with good battery life, though it’s more expensive (and more powerful) than the Acer Nitro 14. The 90 watt-hour battery lasted about seven hours on a single charge. Sure, it’s not the nine hours we saw with the Acer Nitro 14, but it’s still a full workday. The laptop’s Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor represents a move to greater power efficiency. Intel’s HX CPU, by comparison, is designed for raw power and needs to throttle down to remain cool.
Speaking of cooling down, the Alienware x16 R2 also has a good thermal management system (aka cooling system), an impressive feat given the higher-tier RTX 4080 graphics card inside. This laptop boasts four fans, a vapor cooling chamber, and loads of vents. The vapor cooling chamber is a sealed chamber that contains a little bit of liquid. This liquid, when heated up, evaporates and spreads evenly across the chamber. This helps move heat away from essential components.
Still, the delta between the Alienware x16 R2’s seven-hour result in our tests and the Acer Nitro 14’s nine hours reveals some key factors to consider regarding battery life. A larger laptop means a larger screen, which means more power consumption. Similarly, the Alienware’s higher-tier GPU taps the battery more to reach its performance potential and to dissipate its greater heat output. Nevertheless, for a high-performance 16-inch gaming laptop, seven hours is a solid result and should be recognized as such.
Reality check
Actively gaming away from a wall outlet will always impact the battery life, full stop. That said, if you want to use the laptop for everyday tasks or coursework, you can always use Nvidia’s Optimus technology to disable the dGPU when appropriate (so long as you’ve got a compatible graphics card). Also know that battery life benchmarks often differ from real-world day-to-day use, as everything from display brightness to switching on Ultra graphics can come into paly.
You’ve got options out there, but it’s also important to temper your expectations. A standard laptop with lower-tier components will deliver longer battery life than a gaming laptop with the latest and greatest hardware.
Author: Ashley Biancuzzo, Associate Editor, PCWorld
Ashley Biancuzzo manages all laptop and Chromebook coverage for PCWorld. She's been covering consumer tech since 2016, and her work has appeared on USA Today, Reviewed, Polygon, Kotaku, StarWars.com, and Nerdist. In her spare time, she enjoys playing video games, reading science fiction, and hanging out with her rescue greyhound.