While ‘gaming laptop’ and ‘good battery life’ are not often phrases seen in close proximity, you can expect at least a good hour and a half of battery life while gaming out of most of the best gaming laptops. How do I know this? We’ve tested it, of course.
Below you’ll find a chart with all of our results from the previous couple of years, which includes data points for popular gaming laptops from Razer, Asus, Lenovo, Gigabyte, MSI, and more. These come with a range of components, big and small, with the RTX 40-series powering near enough all of them. The RTX 50-series is coming to laptops soon, at which point we’ll review more machines and be able to offer a wider perspective on how they run with the latest CPUs.
We use PCMark’s gaming battery life test, which runs a loop of 3DMark Fire Strike in a window for the duration of the test and spits out a time once you boot the machine back up again.
Gaming laptop battery life results
The blend of CPU and GPU will make a big difference to the overall battery life one can expect from a device. Though other factors play a huge role. Namely, a GPU’s TDP (ie the wattage it’s intended to run at, which is variable by device) and the size of the battery. Software and respective power modes also play a part.
That’s why you might see something like an RTX 4090-powered laptop with surprisingly decent battery life—a large laptop with room for a 99.9 Whr battery with the ability to massively reduce power consumption in power-saving battery mode may outperform an RTX 4050 laptop with a 60 Whr battery and ham-fisted software.
A 99.9 Whr battery is as large as a battery can be be for a laptop. That’s because, at a certain point, the US Federal Aviation Administration won’t let you take a larger battery on a plane. Here’s what it says:
“Batteries 0-100 Wh are allowed on passenger aircraft, 101-160 Wh require air carrier approval, and batteries exceeding 160 Wh are forbidden.”
Clearly there are a few things to consider for battery life, and it does require diving into the specs sheet for any given gaming laptop or device to find out more before you buy. Or you can get a pretty good idea how things shape up for the latest devices from one of our gaming laptop reviews.
