It was bound to happen some day.
I have had laptops for some 20 years now (maybe 10 or so total), and I have managed to avoid damaging any of them seriously. Until now. And it was just about the worst possible time for it.
So, previously I ran some numbers on my laptop and desktop power usage. Laptop was running on some 20w idle, and 160w-ush when running a game. Desktop, on the other hand, was using 160w idle and 250w+ when running a game. (new numbers after some tweaking: 20w for laptop and 90w for desktop, including but not limited to bringing display brightness down a low)
Considering that electricity costs some 30c/kWh right now (tomorrow's high is up to 80c/kWh!), the difference really matters. And of course I managed to drop a damn portable speaker on the laptop, damaging it's screen and making repair necessary at the worst possible time of the year.
It's winter, meaning it's cold (power is needed for heating everywhere), and it's dark (no power from solar panels) and it's also not windy (so very little power from wind). Proverbial perfect storm. Tomorrow's lowest figure is 53c/kWh so I'll be using it here; later at night it drops to 40c or so, but that's too late to make any real difference.
I recently bought Assassins' Creed: Valhalla and got into it. Bad news is that running it on my desktop computer used whopping 500 watts. That's 1€ per 2 hours of playing at that rate. And this is a long game, some reports say 100 hours or so -- so 50€ of electricity on top of purchase price.
I have no idea how much laptop would use when playing this (I shipped it for repairs before I got to try), but let's say 200w. That alone drops power cost to 20€ or so, assuming everything else is the same.
Fortunately however I managed to bring AC:V's power usage down. I have 144Hz display, so it was running at rull rate and game had no direct options of limiting it. After some tweaks, including dropping details to "medium" and manually editing config files to force FPS limit of 60Hz, it "only" uses 250-ish watts on my desktop. Not great, but tolerable. I'm also considering dropping details further to bring that figure down.
And we're not even really affected by this too badly, since our house uses district heating (still fairly cheap) instead of electricity (or natgas, which pretty much no one uses here anyway) for heating.
