I recently purchased a new mid-range gaming laptop, MSI GL72 7RD-02. My preliminary research concluded the battery life on it should last between 4-5 hours depending on workload. I’ve been running only Crusader Kings II (a modest workload by any fairly modern standards) for half an hour now and I’m halfway down on juice. I realize there are ways I could taper back, but even at full bore this still seems wrong.
I’m new to gaming laptops, is this just the way things are or is this battery doggy? I’m going to call MSI customer service in the morning but I’d appreciate some intelligent perspective first. Thanks for your time.
No video modern video game qualifies as “moderate usage.” That’s your first mistake. No, actually your first mistake is misspelling “dodgy.”
Actual “moderate use,” would be something like answering your email, and maybe shopping online. Streaming video ramps things up, and generating video, as games do, will take you close to maximizing usage.
One lesser thing you might try to check, is the actual age of your battery. I can’t tell you how to do it, but on the battery somewhere, there is a code that can be used to determine battery age. The older a Lion battery is, the faster it will run down.
It says its thirsty even when you aren’t actually running the CPU or GPU for any updates, ( using cpu and gpu 0.1%… whereas your game runs the CPU and GPU 100%) , consuming 22 watts whereas top brand laptops would use only 8 Watts to run the screen and wait for your input…which would give the better laptop a 5 hour on time… (depending on what sort of work… eg if its playing a video it might need 5% or 10% of the cpu/gpu… )
The battery is 40 watt hours, so it could sit there idle with the screen on for ONLY two hours.
Because you were using the CPU and GPU, you were using more and more watts, probably 40 Watts and a 40 Watthour battery would give 40 watts for one hour.