G-Helper Battery Care Mode: Is the 80% Charge Limit Worth It?

You spend a lot of your time plugged in, so does being at 100% hurt you? Short answer: Yes, it does. Here I’ll teach you about the foundations of battery lifespan while guiding you through setting it up, whether you’re using your basic ASUS battery care settings or have G-Helper installed (Recommended). I personally found this information needed when first getting my laptop, so I hope someone else can too.

How Laptop Batteries Degrade

Every single laptop out there, including yours (If you have one), uses a lithium battery. These batteries are used because of their high energy storage and relatively cheap production. The only downside, though, is their degradation over time. It’s inevitable for Lithium batteries to have chemical Degradation over time. What does this do? It essentially limits the max amount of energy they can hold. So let’s say 10% of your battery degraded over time. Although you can still charge to 100%, that 100% is only filling up 90% of the battery remaining, lowering your total charge. Luckily, there are some easy ways to slow it down.

What Battery Care Mode Does

ASUS includes this mode in both Armoury Crate and the My ASUS app. This setting is also available if you followed my previous guide and replaced them with G-Helper. The options here are 60%, 80%, 100%. Choosing either 60% or 80%, limit your battery’s max charge to that amount. Why this matters comes down to how lithium batteries degrade.

The speed at which they degrade gets much faster when they are stretched to their limits, specifically within 20% of each extreme. That means when they are at 80%-100% and from 0%-20%, your battery will degrade significantly faster than usual. ASUS Battery Care mode keeps your laptop within a safe range, slowing degradation and thereby lengthening your laptop’s battery lifespan. If you’re wondering what your personal battery health is, go to the command prompt and type this: powercfg /batteryreport

My Personal Experience

ASUS battery care results showing battery health report from Windows command prompt powercfg batteryreport

When I bought my current laptop, an ASUS G16 Zephyrus (2024), I ended up getting it refurbished. It was an excellent deal, but when I checked my battery health, I thought surely it would be good, it’s only 2 years old after all. Turns out it had tanked down to 90% health! This means the previous user, while they didn’t hurt the computer, kept it plugged in at 100% power for a considerable amount of time.

Now I took care to instantly put the 80% limit on, and ever since I had it (around 2 months) it has barely dropped by around .7%. This shows that such a mode will allow you to elongate the health of your battery much longer (and keep its worth if you sell it).

How to Enable Battery Care Mode

G-Helper battery charge limit slider set to 80 percent with arrow pointing to setting on ASUS Zephyrus G16

Since I’m using G-Helper, I’ll show you how to check if you have Battery Care enabled there. For ASUS battery care, you can simply use one of their apps, but I’d recommend the switch. If you aren’t using G-Helper and think you want to siphon some more efficiency and battery out of your laptop, you can peep my G-Helper Installation Guide. Now, going into the G-Helper menu, look out for the outlined Care Mode as seen in the image below. As you can see, they provide a simple slider to choose your amount, so just set it to 80%.

When to turn it off

Now that your battery is protected, make sure to keep it on whenever your laptop is sitting on the charger or simply not being used for long periods. The only time you really need to set it back is if you know you’re going to be using it outside for a lengthened amount of time. For example, if I have multiple classes lined up for the day, I’ll make sure to charge it to 100%, so I’m not that one guy who goes around asking for a charger after his laptop dies. Yeah, once and never again.

This article was a simpler version of a deeper topic, one which is rigorously reviewed in this article here, so please check it out if you’re interested. If you’re curious about another way you can be power efficient for your new (or older) laptop, please check out my undervolt guide to see a new but wonderful way to save battery every day.