there are two ways to extend the battery life of a device one is to have it
consume less power in the first place and the other is to add a bigger battery
to it now unfortunately for the average consumer engineering a new processor
that's more power efficient is not exactly reasonable which leaves adding
more battery power as the only feasible option and mophie who there it is
sponsored this video wanted to help us make that happen so they sent over a
couple of their power stations for us to test they support the usb pd standard
which takes the concept of a regular portable battery bank and jacks it up to
deliver more power and support more devices including the nintendo switch
and even some laptops so
let's take it for a spin and see just how much we can extend the life of my
razer blade stealth
so i'm sure we've all been there you're about to click send on that one last
email and your laptop suddenly dies and you go why don't they just put bigger
batteries in these darn things well the answer to that question is
actually pretty fascinating as it turns out storing massive amounts of energy in
really tiny spaces carries some inherent risks and modern lithium ion batteries
can catch fire and even explode if they're mistreated
for that reason the faa actually set a limit on the capacity for mobile
computers back in 2008 to mitigate some
of the risk from catastrophic battery malfunction on board an aircraft so
since laptop manufacturers don't want to slap stickers on their devices warning
you that you're not allowed to travel with them everyone pretty much stays
under those limits now back in the day you could often buy extended batteries
that popped into the back of popular laptops and then kind of stuck out of
the back or the bottom but modern devices are generally a little sleeker
and don't tend to have user-swappable batteries
so for a while there road warriors had to just rely on laptop manufacturers to
follow through on their all-day battery claims lol now many
laptops these days are still powered by dedicated adapters and traditional
barrel plugs but over the last few years that's been changing macbooks and some
Windows laptops now support charging via usb type-c but choosing a battery bank
that will work with your device isn't as simple as you might think the macbook
pro is actually a great example of a kind of picky eater when it comes to
portable power because of its discrete graphics processor it can draw a
tremendous amount of juice over its usb-c connection so that is where the
power station usb-c 3xl that mophie sent us comes in now let's talk about our
challenge the razer blade stealth 2019 isn't what you would necessarily call a
gaming laptop it's discreet GPU is an NVIDIA mx150 but if you're willing to
crank down your in-game details or run older or esports titles it can actually
deliver a decent gaming experience for a little while so our goal then is
to double the battery life of our machine using the power station usb-c
3xl this 26 000 milliamp hour beast
supports 45 watts of power output via usb-c power delivery now the blade's own
power adapter is rated at 65 watts so we
might not be able to game and actively
charge the device at the same time and we may not get the exact same
performance on the go as we would get while plugged into the wall but it
should be able to provide some power and therefore more gaming time
let's see how much so after gaming playing apex legend specifically for 30
minutes on the blade stealth we experienced a pretty heavy drop to 50
battery then we plugged in the power station usb c3 xl and continued gaming
after another 30 minutes the laptop's battery had only dropped by 20 percent
now some of you might be saying well hold on a second the battery still
dropped so what's the point
the point is that if our laptop is at full charge
without an external battery we can expect about an hour of gaming before
it'll die with our usbc 3xl plugged in we get over
two hours so that's over double the gaming battery life now obviously if
you're not gaming your laptop won't consume as much power so we were
actually able to charge the laptop's 45 watt hour battery while browsing the web
or working on word documents and we get about two full charges worth still some
of you might be disappointed that our stealth didn't actually gain battery
while gaming the truth is though that gpus even teeny tiny ones require a ton
of power to run games and as i mentioned the blade stealth's power adapter puts
out 65 watts and real heavy duty gaming
laptops like the alienware 51m can have power requirements of up to 330 watts so
while the 45 watts coming out of the power station usb c3 xl isn't on that
level it does at least give us a bit more time to game or at least recharge
in between and as a bonus we actually saw better
performance while plugged into the mophie battery than we did running off
the laptop battery alone that's because Windows laptops almost always perform
better while connected to power even when you max out Windows 10's power
management settings while using the battery performance will drop so in apex
legends at 1600 by 900 and low settings we saw an average FPS of around 53 while
plugged into the laptop's own power adapter and 35 FPS while running off the
laptop battery alone with the power station connected our
average FPS sat at around 44 so right in
between changing gears a little bit let's take a look at the power station
hub a combination battery usb wall plug
and wireless charger on the nintendo switch
now the switch has a usbc connector for power but it can be super finicky when
it comes to external batteries so if you were to pick a random battery off a
store shelf it might only charge your console while it's powered off it might
not charge it at all or it might even damage it
way to go nintendo now mophie assures us that none of those
things will happen with the power station hub which has a 6100 milliamp
hour capacity and supports up to 18 watts of power output over usb type c we
figure that should give us some extra matches in smash bros to test that
hypothesis we set two level 9 npcs against each other in smash
after an hour our battery had dropped by 26 percent
then after we continued draining the battery to 50
we plugged in the power station hub after another hour of playing it
actually increased by 20 and since the switch has a 4310 milliamp
hour internal battery the 6100 milliamp hour power station hub should give you
over a full additional charge so thanks for watching guys and thanks to mophie
for sponsoring our little experiment and providing the gear that we needed for
testing the power station and power station mini both sport a high speed usb
c port and an additional usb a port for charging two devices at once they're
wrapped in smooth fabric come in a bunch of stylish colors and they fit in your
pocket for more power and versatility check out the power station hub it's a
battery bank it's a usb hub and it's a wireless charging pad all in one compact
device then of course there's the power station usb-c 3xl which can charge
everything from a smartwatch all the way up to a laptop so never settle for less
than a 100 charge by getting yours at the link in the video description if
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doing it he's not the underwear stop
i hit the mic sorry