Lower Wattage Charger than Original - What is ok and what is not?

ShadowChaser · March 16, 2019

So I have a Gigabyte Aero 15X that I'm looking to get a second charger for, and especially one that's smaller/lighter than the original 180W brick. From my experience with my XPS 13, which comes with a 45W charger but can charge with a 30W, 45W, and 60W brick (USB-C), what matters is input voltage. Is that thinking correct? If I got a 90W or 120W charger that has the same 19.5V output as the original Gigabyte brick will it still work? I would expect it to charge slower, but would it ever just not charge at all?

A similar question - I have a portable charger with a DC output which I use exclusively for my laptops when I travel. Previously, none of my laptops have exceeded its output limit (~75W), can I still charge my notebook provided I have the right plug? Assume I won't be using the laptop as it charges as I don't want to overload the charger/cripple performance.

TrigrH · March 16, 2019

From my understanding is you should be able to charge on a lower wattage adapter but you wont get the full gaming performance while plugged in, the 1070 in that laptop comes with a 180w adapter for a reason.

ShadowChaser · March 17, 2019

30 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

From my understanding is you should be able to charge on a lower wattage adapter but you wont get the full gaming performance while plugged in, the 1070 in that laptop comes with a 180w adapter for a reason.

Yeah, I just wasn't sure haha

Normally when it's not plugged in I just have the dGPU disabled in BIOS outright for maximum battery life

wisex · March 17, 2019

I'd say that as long as you don't do super intensive work with the lower voltage charger you should be fine, reason being that if say you're gaming at max settings therefore fully utilizing the CPU and GPU you will actually see that despite being plugged in you will lose battery. According to this site your model laptop would utilize between 14 and 22 watts at idle, and it surprisingly only uses 128 watts when playing the witcher 3. So basically TL;DR if you want a second smaller charger make sure that it provides enough power to charge your machine when you are doing the tasks you want to do while using that charger.