It’s very hard to estimate the true power consumption of laptops since they are all primarily fed from the battery not the charger. There are almost no passthroughs anymore even in “gaming” laptops. Only a handful of DTR laptops still employ a passthrough with a high wattage PSU or dual PSU set up and I honestly haven’t seen those for the last 2-3 gens...
The last one I’ve seen that had it was a 8700K with dual 1080’s DRT monstrosity.
> It’s very hard to estimate the true power consumption of laptops since they are all primarily fed from the battery not the charger.
That's news to me. I try to keep up to date with laptops, and all the reviewers have pretty accurate power consumption measurements. Even just using the internal reporting reveals quite a few details [1].
Even a "12W" TDP 11th gen Intel CPU can draw up to 50W in turbo mode [2].
The 11th gen "45W" laptop CPUs have a PL2 power draw of 135W [3], which, thermals and VRMs permitting, can be held indefinitely according to the specs (which is what makes Intel's whole TDP-rating useless indeed).
So yes, it's very hard indeed to estimate newer laptop's power consumption, but for entirely different reasons. It's primarily the cooling and OEM's choice of how to implement the very loosely defined (Intel!-) specs that define power draw. If you have excellent cooling, there's nothing to stop an 11800H from drawing 135W for minutes at a time... (which can be measured, both internally and from the wall no problem).
AMD CPUs on the other hand mostly adhere to the published power rating (give or take 20% - again, cooling permitting and configurable by the OEM).
The last one I’ve seen that had it was a 8700K with dual 1080’s DRT monstrosity.