Maker Pro
Maker Pro

200mW drain on Laptop Battery?

A

Al Franz

Jan 1, 1970
0
SMC recently came out with a higher power Wireless PC Card, it draws 200mW
power output, much more then the normal 30mW most cards do. Can anyone give
me an idea of what type of drain this would do to a laptop. If a normal
charge was 4 hours with a standard card, what type of length would be lost
by using a 200mW card (10 min, 30min, 1 hr, 2 hr ???)
 
W

William P.N. Smith

Jan 1, 1970
0
Al Franz said:
SMC recently came out with a higher power Wireless PC Card, it draws 200mW
power output, much more then the normal 30mW most cards do.

Well, our laptops have normal (40WH, 2 hour) and high-capcity (80WH, 4
hour) batteries, so they draw something around 20 watts when running,
so another 0.2 watts would be another 1%, so might reduce the run time
by a minute or two.
 
B

Bob Peterson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Al Franz said:
SMC recently came out with a higher power Wireless PC Card, it draws 200mW
power output, much more then the normal 30mW most cards do. Can anyone give
me an idea of what type of drain this would do to a laptop. If a normal
charge was 4 hours with a standard card, what type of length would be lost
by using a 200mW card (10 min, 30min, 1 hr, 2 hr ???)

hard to tell. probably not a whole lot. 200 mW is not much measured against
what the rest of the computer takes.
 
B

Bert Menkveld

Jan 1, 1970
0
Loren Amelang said:
I understand your logic, but it doesn't match my experience. I don't have
experimental numbers, but when I'm using my G54 card it puts a very
noticeable dent in my notebook run time. I guess it depends on your
particular usage pattern, like all computer power consumption...

Loren

Maybe the 200mW mentioned is the RF output power of the card, not its total
power consumption. That is, in order to produce the 200mW of radiated RF
output, the card might consume much more power (several times seems quite
plausible).
 
Top