> We have the exact same machines, yet mine somehow basically never has its fan on running Linux and compiling Rust, whereas theirs is often audible while running Windows with a couple of chrome tabs open and outlook.
I think some of this is just poor defaults. Every windows laptop I've had in the last 10 years has defaulted to a thermal management profile that ran the fans aggressively. Usually you have to install some crapware from the manufacturer (it's "Dell Optimizer" on my current machine) that allows you to change the thermal profile to quiet mode, and it's totally fine after that.
> You can blame the noise of the fan on the push for crazy flat laptops though. There's no reason a still light but thicker laptop couldn't use a larger slower moving fan. Well, other than the perception of thick as heavy and thus bad.
FWIW I've taken apart many laptops over many generations and the general trend seems to be that OEMs always use a cooling solution that's just-so good enough, regardless of available space and laptop cost. When you give an OEM a 40 % reduction in power through a new CPU generation, you're giving them a choice: a) spend the same amount of money on a cooling solution that's as capable as before, so now you'll get a quiet and cool laptop or b) make the cooling solution 40 % smaller, making it cheaper, and keeping noise and heat roughly similar.
> It's only a problem if throttling takes them below the advertised base clock under normal conditions.
Seems like a bit of a contradiction?
Dell said that my laptop would have an i7-7700HQ at 2.8 GHz + turbo to 3.something, and a GTX 1050m.
The laptop Dell sent me behaved like this under load: it goes to the max turbo speed, overheats within a few seconds to a minute, and then throttles to 800 MHz.
It's like if someone advertised a car as having a 280 HP engine, but the engine controller limited it to 100 HP because it had an inadequate cooling system and would overheat at any more load. It is deceptive.
With the laptop, underclocking can fix the CPU throttling - mine can now sustain the max turbo speed forever at 70 degrees. But that's like buying the 100 HP car and modding it to get to 280 - you were sold a faulty product. In the case of the laptop it's fixable in software so that's not as big of a deal, but how many normal people do you think would be willing to mess with their CPU voltages? Or even be aware of the throttling?
Even after underclocking the CPU, I cannot use it at the same time as the discrete graphics card. If I do, the combined heat makes the CPU once again go to 800 MHZ.
Expecting to be able to use the hardware my computer was advertised as having is not having unrealistic expectations.
> I'm a little confused at what's "sturdier" about a gaming laptop as well.
In my experience most gaming laptops are made of metal or thick plastic and seem more durable. I actually had a MSI laptop, it was a tank - like the revered Thinkpads, but better. Dropped it from a few feet and it only got a scratch on the surface.
> A gaming laptop is not really a laptop at all by comparison. They still get less than 4 hours of battery life under load, they're an inch or more thick, they're heavy. Many of them do not fit in backpacks. Gaming laptops are essentially designed for plugged in operation.
That's why I got the XPS 15. Had I known that its performance was a fraction of what was advertised I would have ignored this whole category of deceptive laptops and bought a gaming laptop, even though they have all these downsides.
>Happens to some crappy laptops. These are basically irrelevant details.
Don't most modern (>2010) CPU's thermal throttle until they are back within operating temps? You'd have to stuff a laptop inside a backpack while maxing it to get it to overheat to the point of resetting
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
> Especially when unplugged which will cause Alder Lake to significantly drop in performance.
At least in a laptop, it's not just when you unplug the laptop that performance drops. You've also got to have enough volume in the laptop to shoehorn in a major cooling system if you're going to keep the P series processors from throttling.
For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles:
>Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads.
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
>I had a coworker that nearly burn his leg when having the laptop on them and coding with Spotify in the background.
I wanted to argue: this isn't a laptop, until I remebered how my XPS 15 almost burned off my finger tips, and not only once, but several times. If you pack a gaming gpu into a notebook, guess what will happen: people will use it to play games, and boom: the thing is at a constant ~90°C while doing so...
How is a product like this passing any QA and beeing rushed out of the door ?
> If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down.
If that was the gamble, you'd assume that the laptops would thermal throttle way below the physical Tjunction limit. As a matter of fact, they're still allowing themselves to reach very high temperatures even in common usage, despite an undersized (hence, to some extent, less reliable) cooling solution. That's kinda hard to explain as a sensible choice.
>they only have to dissipate about 20W of heat more at peak
That's a hell of a lot of extra heat in a thin laptop. Especially if a big chunk of the market values silence. An office full of laptops all sounding like airplanes isn't ideal.
> I was able to work around most of the cooling-related issues by mounting the laptop vertically...
Have you happened to measure the thermal difference vertically mounting your laptop? I also vertically mounted my home server laptop for the same reasons, but noticed the fans seemed much louder so I returned it to be horizontal like normal. It's as if they were designed so that the horizontal surface acts to attenuate their high-frequency sounds. It's still annoying, but less so. I'm wondering if going vertical again, but throttling the CPU as you've done is the way to go.
> not bulky gaming laptops with lots of cooling & ventilation
Those also have cooling problems. I bought a bulky one with 3 fans just because it had a nice processor. It couldn't sustain high performance under load for more than 5 seconds even with the fans maxed out. Compiling some code pushes CPU temperatures into the 80-90 °C range. Scrolling a chat in WhatsApp web also overheats my laptop.
> I have a T420 and have major heating issues with it playing games.
In my experience, almost no consumer laptop is designed with a gaming thermal load in mind (aka heavy cpu + max gpu for extended periods of time). I'm not even sure it's possible in a conventional laptop case.
... I know this is completely useless advice, but don't do heavy gaming on a laptop without expecting problems. There are other form factors much better thermally suited.
tl;dr: mobility/thermal-tolerance/performance, pick two
> Fully parallelized workloads in a consumer laptop are just exceedingly rare.
Eh? Probably THE most common workload for a laptop (opening a webpage) is multi-threaded. And even consumers multi-task. As soon as you have multiple processes, you can use multiple cores even without multi-threading support.
> Plus it's exceedingly pointless to do lengthy multi-threaded development on a laptop, it's going to overheat and under-clock.
The promise of these laptops is that they won't. As you say, their power consumption is a lot lower than competing chips, and it's that power that produces the heat.
Honest question here: have you actually tried to find the answer to that question?
As I'm writing this comment, my 2019 Pixelbook Go is quiet. It's a fanless design, so it being quiet is normal, but it is also not running hot. I've got around 30 tabs open, a few terminals, Emacs, and some other stuff running.
So back to my question - have you looked into what is actually going on in your machine? Dust in the fans?
I don't want to know the thermals on the laptop then.
There is a reason for the 3070 being available with a minimum of 2 large fans and liquid cooling existing at all. How do you want to cool the same performance in a thin laptop? With passive airflow?
For reference, this is what a laptop with the mobile (!) version of a 3070 looks like:
> We use 11th Gen Intel CPUs and the product is approximately the thickness and weight of a MacBook Pro 13-inch.
Does it dissipate heat efficiently or will it nearly melt down the second I type make into the terminal like every other laptop I've ever owned including gamer laptops with at least 3 noisy fans?
> Anticipating the spring season in the Northern Hemisphere
Well, that's kind of an issue that's about to start: heat from the Sun will melt your laptops, your thermal firmware won't like it. Also the screen glare.
I, specifically, have to close the blinds in my office otherwise I can't see shit. And when I do benchmarks I put the laptop on top of the AC vent pipe.
> ...I don't know that I've used a laptop before with the thermal management to withstand extended full load- either it throttles down or it damages itself.
Setting your "it damages itself" remark aside for the moment, every laptop I've ever personally owned runs flat-out indefinitely at its rated maximum speed. I make a point of choosing laptops that have properly-designed cooling systems.
Electromigration is real, but that's a process that happens over many, many years. It is (_strictly speaking_) damage... but the only real way to entirely prevent it is to never use the device in question.
> ...unless your rig is water cooled...
In my personal experience, for mainstream (and, yes, this includes "workstation" and "server") CPUs, water cooling isn't notably better than a big-ass Noctua heatsink with a couple of their 140mm fans strapped to it.
Phase change "heat pipes" are really fuckin good for rapidly transferring heat from the contact pad of these heat sinks out to their radiating fins, and the big fans that are usually paired with them are quite good at cycling enough air through the system to ensure that the heat is moved out of the radiator in a timely manner.
> Laptops shouldn't be using boost anyways, because their form factors and CPU coolers just can't handle the heat output.
That's quite a sweeping statement. The adequacy of cooling seems to depend a lot on the device and its configuration.
I've had two small form-factor ThinkPads at default configuration over the last nine years, and there have been zero problems with heat. The CPUs have conservative TDP limits, and the cooling seems adequate for that.
One of the laptops ended up with a broken keyboard after ~seven years, but if that hadn't happened, it would probably still be in daily (and not always particularly light) use, as it had been until then.
I'm sure some manufacturers and models choose their parts less conservatively, and put too powerful CPUs or GPUs (or set their cTDP too high) in a chassis that can't really handle it. For them, the maximum turbo allowed by their CPU/configuration might be too much over prolonged periods. Some of those devices might end up failing due to thermal issues within some years.
But for more conservatively configured laptops (such as business ones), disabling turbo would probably quite needlessly limit their performance. Unless you're aiming for a much, much longer lifespan than almost anybody uses their devices.
I think some of this is just poor defaults. Every windows laptop I've had in the last 10 years has defaulted to a thermal management profile that ran the fans aggressively. Usually you have to install some crapware from the manufacturer (it's "Dell Optimizer" on my current machine) that allows you to change the thermal profile to quiet mode, and it's totally fine after that.
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