Performance decrease with an inferior charger?

[jacobku]

A while ago I bought a laptop with decent specs (listed below) and I get pretty low frames on a well optimized game like Skyrim unless I make it windowed with a lower resolution and set it to medium graphics and such, I have to do the same with Rust, and I can't even play Forest (But that's awful with ati gpus)

Spoiler: specs

Specs:
CPU: i5 2.67GHz
Gpu: Ati radeon mobility 6550 hd (1GB)
Ram: 8GB
HDD: 750 GB 5400 rpm
res: 1600x900

Anyway, I bought the laptop originally without a charger (i knew it wasn't included, I just bought a charger on ebay for like 6$). I often get the message "Blah blah low capacity charger get a better one for better performance" Seen here. I'm wondering just how much of a difference it actually makes, does it decrease the graphics card by 50%, the cpu by 60%, etc... I'm using a 65w charger, I believe it's made for a 90w charger though. Any and all help is appreciated, thanks.

 

[volcanoscout]

Depending on the system, it can make quite a large difference. Have you noticed a difference in performance between playing on battery and playing while plugged in? If you run some monitored benchmarks, you'll find that unless you set your power profile to performance (and accept the loss of battery endurance), you'll lose a large chunk of your gaming capacity. Even set on performance you'll drop a measurable amount. A laptop battery just can't match the power coming from the wall.

Running your laptop with wattage lower than your system is rated for has the same result, although maybe not to the same degree. Your laptop will pull what it needs from the adapter - if you have a 65W adapter and your system is only drawing half of that for operation, it will divert the other half to charging the battery. If it needs the full 90W, it's going to pull 65W and distribute it accordingly, so all of your components are going to receive a portion that's 28% lower than optimal. (It's not exactly proportional, but that's close enough.) Some laptops make up the difference by drawing on the battery, even while plugged in. Two of my laptops have 120W adapters (20V/6A) - I have a light travel charger that pushes 75W that I'll use when I don't want to carry the brick. If I try to game using the travel charger, my laptop battery will drain itself even while plugged into the wall.

A good rule of thumb to use with laptop power supplies/adapters is to keep them +/- 5% of the required capacity. Any more and you risk frying your system; any less and you'll starve it of power.

 

[jacobku]

Well thanks for the response... for anyone wondering I did buy a 90w charger, and I'd say it made somewhat of a difference, but it wasn't astronomical. I kind of dropped Skyrim but I started playing Rust a lot more, and I would say I find a 10-20 frame difference depending on which server I'm playing.

 

[volcanoscout]

LOL - most of my gamer friends would find a 10-20 FPS difference astronomical.

 

[jacobku]

LOL - most of my gamer friends would find a 10-20 FPS difference astronomical.

I guess it really depends on the game for me... In rust the graphics are pretty bad in the Legacy version (experimental isn't near finished, no servers up) and I'm fine with that, but I can't tell much of a difference between 50 and 60 fps, for me either is great. You also freeze for about a half second every once in a while depending on the servers, and there's many different servers with different mods and/or structures depending on when it was wiped, so your graphics will differ anyway and it's not entirely dependent on your computer specs... Anyway it helped nonetheless and even the 90w charger only cost like 13 bucks.

 

[volcanoscout]

Well, if nothing else it'll extend your usable battery life. I would hold on to the 65W charger though - carrying the larger charger while traveling can be a pain. If you think you're all set, you might want to select a best answer so this thread stops showing as "Unsolved". You'll still be able to post to it if you want. If anything else comes up, you can start a new thread. Feel free to PM me if there's anything else I can do.

Cheers

 

[jacobku]

Oh, right, thanks.. new here.
edit: Uh..how exactly do I do that? ._.
edit2: Nevermind, saw the sticky and requested it to be changed to a question.