How to learn the maximum power usage of my laptop

Question

Other people already asked this question, and were referred to internet tools to calculate maximum power usage, but I don't know how to get the information it wanted. For example, it wanted to know how many RAM components I had and how much RAM each one had. I only know that I have 16GBs of RAM, as far as I know that could be 4 4GB cards, or two 8 GB cards, or 137,438,953,472 cards, one per bit, IDK jack. My CPU is Intel Core i5-4210H but I can't find it on any of the web calculators. They ask about my GPU, which I was quite certain was by Nvida, yet when I run DXDIAG, all it says is Intel Graphics 4600. but the web calculators, only have AMD/Nvida options.

The thing is, I have a laptop, which has a battery. Is there really no way to measure how much power my computer uses with out purchasing a gizmo? It seems to me like a no brainer that something like that would be built into a laptop, especially one as powerful as mine. (IDK how powerful it is, but it can play Fallout 4 on high settings with a realistic ENB mod...I've only encountered a couple games that I need to lower the settings on)

Maybe this isn't relevant, but the reason I want to know is because I was thinking about building a tiny house, and I want to invest in a solar panel that will keep my laptop charged even while I'm playing demanding vidya.

Answer 1

Use hwinfo program to get internals of your laptop on Windows. Use dmidecode on Unix based systems for the same things.

You can track battery status by using BatteryInfoView (BTW, it will show wearing level too), but to measure real consumed power it would be probably the best idea to get in any homedepot store device that calls "Kill-A-Watt" (isn't expensive)

As about tiny house, ghm... cheapest and fastest solution I think would be http://www.containerhomeplans.org/

Answer 2

Online power usage calculators are by no means precise, they can give you a reasonable estimate at best. If by mistake you specify 2 RAM modules when in fact you have one, I would expect the resulting discrepancy be rather small compared to the discrepancy between the estimation and the actual power consumption that you could measure.

Another point: whatever power consumption estimate you'll get has to be checked for taking the efficiency of your laptop's power supply into account, and divided by the said efficiency if it doesn't.

A simple way to be sure your laptop will be able to work and charge from the solar panel is to get a panel which provides at least the power specified on your laptop's power supply. About half of it should be enough to keep the laptop charged while being used. Anything more precise than that would require actual measurements.