Any way to determine how many watts my Laptop outputs?

E

enzio

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
101
I am going on a long two week road trip later this summer and wanted to get one of those car adapters, but I wasn't sure what continuous/max voltage I should purchase. Well, actually I want to use two at the same time, since my brother is there as well.

Mine has an AMD 3200+, some crummy GeForce 64MB gfx card, and and 80gb HDD.

Don't remember exactly what my brother has, it's a newer model, has a dual core processor, a 7600, and a 200gb HDD.

Is there any way to tell if a 300 continuous/400 max would suffice?
 
Your laptop doesn't output watts, it consumes them. lol

Just look on the AC power adapter that came with it and get a car adapter that matches or exceeds the watt rating. Make sure the voltage and current ratings match too.
 
can your car handle it? if you pull too many amps from the cig lighter you'll blow a fuse or worse. you can certianly get away with one lappy on but since one person will be driving at any given time then it would no make any sense to have both on at the same time.

btw, are you going to QC?
 
But you would just blow a fuse to the cig lighter, and the car would still run right?
 
My car says 120w max on it. Laptops tend to use 65/90/120w+, these days you rarely see 120+, I'd guess your brother's uses 90w. So 300w max is more than enough, the question is does your car support that.

You can look at your regular power brick and calculate the wattage from the amps written on the sticker.
 
3-Phase said:
But you would just blow a fuse to the cig lighter, and the car would still run right?
Click to expand...

it would still run, no worries.




to the OP, buy or borrow a kill-a-watt meter and use it to get a rough idea as to how much power you really need.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top