Would disabling 2 cores and my 960m boost the battery life of my gaiming laptop? When I first got my laptop I didn't factor in how constantly looking for charging points around uni would be such a pain.
-Go into the settings for power saving mode and reduce the allowed CPU usage down to like 30%. That CPU has enough juice for browsing and such at 30% or even 20% of its spec.
Power saving mode will prevent it using the 960m. The next biggest drain will be screen brightness, this eats the battery. I'm guessing this runs an SSD instead of a HDD as I found upgrading to an SSD also makes noticeable improvement. Finally look for a larger Wh spare battery.
by far the most effective way to extend battery life for gaming is to reduce the display resolution of the game.
the larger the frame size, the more power the gpu will need to create the frames. it is far too easy to change
the resolution in most games to needlessly gobble plugged in power on battery.