Laptop gaming power efficiency

[Psyonus]

Hi there,

 

I am looking at an off-grid build for a holiday home and I was wondering if anyone has tested if gaming laptops are more power efficient than their desktop counterparts (same gpu, specs) with the obvious exception of intel cpus being laptop only versions.

It would be really interesting to see how they have scaled over time, have they become more similar or further apart in terms of absolute watts used in a series of given benchmarks and general use.

[genexis_x]

You should be comparing real world performance not efficiency. IMO efficiency wise are pretty much the same. Performance wise laptop can compete with desktop, however they need more tuning like undervolting CPU+GPU, repaste etc

[porina]

I'd look at it from a slightly different direction. Power efficiency is influenced by a few things you can more easily control in a desktop, primarily cooling, voltage and clocks. This applies to both CPU and GPU. Generally speaking, lower clocks need lower voltages, and power usage generally goes up faster than the performance level. Also efficiency drops with higher temperatures. You can pick your efficiency level. Maybe better for GPUs than CPUs, but having more cores at lower clock will generally be more power efficient than fewer cores at higher clock, for the same performance level. It applies to CPUs too but thread scaling is more of a problem there.

[KarathKasun]

1 hour ago, ZM Fong said:

You should be comparing real world performance not efficiency. IMO efficiency wise are pretty much the same. Performance wise laptop can compete with desktop, however they need more tuning like undervolting CPU+GPU, repaste etc

Laptops are inherently more power efficient because they operate lower on the voltage/clock curve.  This lead can be 50% or greater in most cases.