Short battery life in gaming laptops (2025)

Alternative title: Relatively high fan noise at seemingly low load

Introduction

Many users of gaming laptops are surprised by short battery life, even under supposedly low load. Yet reviews praise the battery life as being quite long. In most cases, there is a clear pattern behind this:

Either the NVIDIA graphics processor (dGPU) is still active, even though it should actually be in sleep mode when idle.
Or a program is keeping the CPU awake and consumes unnecessary power.

In this article, we explain how to check and eliminate these two issues.

Step 1: Use HWiNFO64 to check where the power consumption is coming from

Instructions:

Download the free HWiNFO64 tool: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
Remove all external monitors and disconnect the charger from the laptop.
Start HWiNFO64 in "Sensors-only" mode.
Search for the following sensors in the HWiNFO64 sensor view.
Double-click on each of these sensors to display the sensor values as a graph.

Important sensors:

GPU Power (NVIDIA): shows whether the graphics card is asleep (should be at 0 W when idle).
CPU Package Power: shows the CPU's power consumption (usually below 5 W when idle).
Charge Rate: shows how quickly the battery is discharging (approx. −10 to −15 W when idle under normal conditions).

Example screenshot:

Observations:

If the GPU power is permanently above 0 W (zero watts), the graphics card is active. If this is the case, it is going to be the main cause of poor battery life.
If the CPU power is unusually high even though the GPU power is at 0 W, software is keeping the CPU busy. This would also be bad for battery life.

Step 2: Common triggers that keep the GPU awake

The usual suspects:

Game launchers (e.g. Epic Games Launcher; but not Steam) or other tools in automatic startup can keep the GPU awake. This is particularly problematic as these programs run permanently in the background.
Browsers or browser-based apps such as Spotify, Discord or Microsoft Teams: they use the dGPU for hardware acceleration if the dGPU was already awake when the programme was launched (due to an external monitor or another app, such as a game launcher).
External monitors via HDMI, DisplayPort and USB-C keep the graphics card permanently active, provided that the corresponding port is connected to the dGPU. This is normal. Many gaming laptops have ports on both the iGPU and the dGPU.

Possible solutions:

Remove the relevant programs from the startup list. It is best to check the settings of the respective application directly – many programs (e.g. Discord, Teams, Spotify, Launcher) have their own ‘Run at Windows startup’ option. Deactivate this option there.
Close and reopen apps. This may work for browser-based apps that only use the dGPU for hardware acceleration of content ‘by accident’.
Alternatively: Set the app to energy saving in the Windows graphics settings. This only works for applications that want to render themselves completely on the dGPU, such as gaming or various game launchers.
If you are using a portable monitor on battery power, you should connect it to a display output that is connected to the iGPU – see your laptop's spec sheet.

Step 3: If the CPU is the culprit instead of the GPU

Investigation:

In Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), you can see in the "Details" tab whether a process is constantly generating CPU load.
Click on the "CPU" table header to sort the processes by CPU load. The idle process should then be at the top.
Now look at the processes at the top of the list.
Some processes jump back and forth between 0 and 1% for a short time – this is normal.
But no process should be permanently above 0 per cent (except for the idle process).

Example screenshot:

Consequences:

If you find processes that are permanently at 1% or above, investigate which programmes are behind them.
Critically evaluate those processes that seem suspicious to you with permanently "high" CPU load: do these programmes do anything useful? Do they perhaps have functions that you would prefer to deactivate? Should you perhaps remove them entirely from automatic startup or even uninstall them?

Explanation: Why do even low percentages cause high battery consumption for the CPU?

The percentages in Task Manager are by design misleading: they depend heavily on the number of CPU cores you have. Current gaming laptops have between 8 and 24 cores. A single core that is permanently utilised may only appear in the display with a few percentage points of total load. However, it is precisely this single core that is then clocked particularly high by the system and receives a disproportionate amount of energy, while the other cores are dormant. This explains why even seemingly small percentages can significantly increase battery consumption and fan noise.

Caution: what you should not do

Disabling the NVIDIA GPU in Device Manager does not help – on the contrary. If you disable the NVIDIA GeForce graphics card in Device Manager, the hardware remains active internally but cannot go to sleep due to lack of driver access – this causes consumption to increase instead of decrease.

The hard switch: iGPU-only mode

Some gaming laptops offer an iGPU-only mode in either BIOS setup or Control Center. This ensures that the system only uses the integrated graphics unit (iGPU) and that the dedicated NVIDIA graphics card is completely disabled via hardware.

This is an extremely effective method of completely preventing ‘accidental’ GPU usage by programs. However, activating or deactivating this function requires a restart – precisely because it is a hardware function.

If you don't need the dGPU for a longer period of time, this method allows you to consistently eliminate the uncertainty factor of "GPU not going to sleep". However, you should still check whether the CPU is being occupied by background software (see step 3 above).

Nothing helps?

There may be other, rarer causes for high system consumption after CPU and GPU have already been ruled out. For these cases, you can find more detailed instructions in this older FAQ article:

Problems with battery life, idle power consumption, or relatively high fan noise despite low load (long article, slightly older)

Extra tips (after fixing CPU/GPU issues)

Please also read the following FAQ articles:

Of course, screen brightness and refresh rate also play a role in battery life. However, the influence of the refresh rate varies greatly depending on the model and is limited by technologies such as PSR (Panel Self-Refresh).

Generally, it is important to understand that these tips will not help much if the major consumers on the CPU and, above all, GPU side are not eliminated first.