Battery generator, increasing run times for a powerful laptop

Hey everyone, ive finally decided on my laptop to use for school "Graphic Programming"

The Asus Zephyrus, ive found a great deal at $1,950 shipped with a gtx1080. I will mostly be around a power source to plug in. Though, with its terrible run times on just batrery. Im considering a portable battery generator for sround $200 used.

Im curious if anyone uses them, below are run times i could actually getbusing a small portable rechargeable plug in battery.


Ive found a 400wh battery generator. Its about 15 pounds. Charges by solar, or via wall outlet. Its pretty small, and portable as well.

(1) Utilizing a full 100% load at 196 watts or 10 amps running a unrealistic "STRESS TEST" with a i7 7700HQ , and gtx1080 overclocked. Plugged in to the battery generator i could get 3.4 hours run time!

(2) Playing a very demanding game "Witcher 3" on ultra settings the power usage is around 148 watts, or 7 amps. And this would run nearly 5 hours straight!

(3) Utilizing a average workload, running blender, cad, or sony vegas pro would pull around 80 watts, or 4 amps. Giving a run time of 8.1 hours straight use.

This laptop on just its battery, on idle, min brightness, 0 load. Will run just 3 hours unplugged. And just 44 minutes in full load..

What do you guys think!?? This would be something id use every now and then. Not everyday. But, i like the numbers!

Excuse my typing, im using a very poor device

 

Your terminology's a bit confused, I think you are just talking about a large battery pack that charges via solar or wall plug, and not an actual generator.

If it provides clean power to the adapter, that should be no problem, but how "used" it is and how much battery capacity has been lost is important.

If it's something you need to cart around in a backpack, with the lappy, then size and weight is the most important factor, and I'm assuming that's behind why you paid a premium for a MaxQ thin'n'light in the first place.

If it's something for example you can keep in the boot of your car, why not consider a small car battery pack / jump starter and an inverter, which could be had (new) from an auto parts store much cheaper. Maybe avoid the budget square wave inverters, dirty power generally speaking accelerates degradation on components.

 

Its a power inverter with a big battery attached lol. Only its in a nice portable package. And it doesnt look like a car battery lol. It is practically a brand new item, only opened and lightly used. It has multiple usb ports, multiple 110v ports.

It is a large battery at 400wh. And it would have multiple purposes. Power outages, charging phones, laptop etc. Etc. And it uses a 4 panel solar system that can recharge the entire thing in sbout 4-5 hours depending on weather, and then fold away neatly.

Ive taken on a problem with the Asus zephyrus. I love the looks, it overclocks the gtx1080 in to the 1900's mhz range. And runs very cool surprisingly! But battery life is non existance.

 

You need to include conversion losses in your calculation. The battery may be rated at 400 Whr but there will be one conversion loss in producing mains voltage and AC power and then another conversion less when the notebook PSU converts the power back to the DC (probably around 19V) which the computer uses. if the conversion efficiency at each step is 85% then your 400 Whr becomes 289 Whr. After taking into account that it's not good practice to fully drain Lithium batteries the effective capacity will be even lower.

However, a big rechargeable battery pack has other uses, as you mention but you need to reduce your expectations about how long the computer will run under full load. Cutting back on the CPU / GPU speed can give 3/4 of the performance with half the power consumption.

John

 

^^^^

What that guy said. Lower your expectations and power usage on the laptop some and it will generate longer runtimes. And personally I think it is a waste to do serious crunching on a laptop unless necessary which in most cases, actually all. Sounds like you're trying to upgrade portability by adding size and weight which is counter intuitive.