Question My laptop battery is draining when gaming. Please help?

[neo4evr]

Hello,
I have an Asus Vivobook S530, this exact model: https://www.flipkart.com/asus-vivob...dauwmo0000001562149116092&qH=6f5edb3911547422

When I am gaming (World of Tanks, Apex Legends at low-medium settings) the battery is draining even though my laptop is plugged in.
The power supply is rated at 19V, 3.42A which is approximately 65W.
And in a review on Notebookcheck I read that the max power the laptop draws is 63-64W.

Then why is my battery draining when it's connected to the mains?
Would appreciate any help or suggestion.
Many thanks!

 

[Urzu1000]

Interesting. Is the charger that you're using the one that came with the laptop originally?

 

[neo4evr]

Interesting. Is the charger that you're using the one that came with the laptop originally?

Yes. This is the original Asus charger that came with my laptop.
It drains like around 8% to 10% every hour when plugged in and gaming.
I think I should test it with Kill A Watt? What do you think?

There is also another issue I have, when charging the battery it fast-charges till 90% but then the rest 10% takes over 40 minutes to charge. Sometimes upto 1 hour. Only for the rest 10%.

Is this normal? Or is my charger faulty?

 

[Urzu1000]

To be completely honest with you, I'm not certain. If it's the original charger then there shouldn't be any issues there. Chargers typically don't wear out that fast.

The battery is the next culprit. Windows has a few built in battery tests that you can run. The BIOS might also show the battery health, but it varies by manufacturer.

Copying this from elsewhere on the internet. Open CMD and try running...

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\battery_report.html"

 

[neo4evr]

To be completely honest with you, I'm not certain. If it's the original charger then there shouldn't be any issues there. Chargers typically don't wear out that fast.

The battery is the next culprit. Windows has a few built in battery tests that you can run. The BIOS might also show the battery health, but it varies by manufacturer.

Copying this from elsewhere on the internet. Open CMD and try running...

powercfg /batteryreport /output "C:\battery_report.html"

Hi,
I tried using this command in PowerShell, and it shows me battery is in good condition.

NAME	ASUS Battery
MANUFACTURER	ASUSTeK
SERIAL NUMBER	-
CHEMISTRY	LIon
DESIGN CAPACITY	42,103 mWh
FULL CHARGE CAPACITY	42,588 mWh
CYCLE COUNT	7

It's discharing also fine. Like 3.5 minutes every 1% when browsing and around 5 minutes when idle.

I can't figure out too what's the problem Since there are not any post on the web about this exact problem so I can't find a solution...

 

[Urzu1000]

Gotcha. The next step is to ensure the charge port is clear of debris. Even if it looks clean and you blow on it, that doesn't necessarily mean it is clean. Try taking a wooden tooth pick and scraping around it to remove any caked dust/etc.

I also realize that you could probably turn down the brightness of your screen slightly when gaming as a potential work-around. Anything to reduce power draw would do the trick really. Hopefully we can find a real solution though.

 

[neo4evr]

Gotcha. The next step is to ensure the charge port is clear of debris. Even if it looks clean and you blow on it, that doesn't necessarily mean it is clean. Try taking a wooden tooth pick and scraping around it to remove any caked dust/etc.

I also realize that you could probably turn down the brightness of your screen slightly when gaming as a potential work-around. Anything to reduce power draw would do the trick really. Hopefully we can find a real solution though.

This is a new laptop I really doubt that there is any dust in there... but still I will clean it as you say.
I found that this problem is common in gaming laptops where power draw (at max load) is more than the wattage the power supply can deliver. In fact my Predator Helios also draws more power than the power supply can deliver. But my Dell ultrabook doesn't have this issue.
This new laptop is also kind of a light-weight laptop with i5 8265U processor and MX150 graphics card, with a hard disk. I wonder why it should draw so much power...?

PS: I tried lowering brightness it hardly changes anything. Also the max screen brightness is just average so it's difficult to play games at lower brightness.

 

[Urzu1000]

My apologies, I didn't realize the laptop was new. If that's the case then the only thing I can come up with is to either reduce the power plan in control panel (which would dampen performance) or to potentially look into getting another charge cable with more throughput than the one that came with the laptop (but not too much since you don't want to fry anything).

If it's just a matter of power in versus power out then the only two options available are to decrease power out or increase power in. Maybe someone with a little more experience with these issues will chime in.