Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: High-Performance Laptop That Doesn't Overheat?
AqD writes: Last year we started to replace business/multimedia-grade laptops with gaming laptops at work, after several years of frustration with overheating and throttling issues that plagued our laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and basically every brand you can find on market, making it impossible to write code and run db/test environment all on the same laptop.
The first new batch comes from Clevo because their gaming laptops don't look like gaming laptops, and they offer 3-6 disk slots which we badly need. The result is acceptable, however, not quite as good as I had expected. Mine has i7-4700mq CPU which is more or less equivalent to an older i7 on the desktop, but its temperature is raised to 70-80C while turbo boost is on, even with the best thermal paste. My friend's i7-4801mq is worse — it could never stay at the advertised 3.6GHz for more than a few seconds before it burns up over 90 and starts to throttle. Its benchmark result is nearly identical to the 4700mq because of heat problems. And it's only 3.6GHz! The best i7 CPU on a desktop could easily run closer to 5GHz with 6 cores / 12 threads running!
So what should we choose next time? We're not looking for something cool or slim or light. We need real laptops which can at least run prime calculation at advertised turbo boost speed, full cores/threads for an entire day. A nice bonus would be manual fan control plus easy access to the fan for cleaning.
The first new batch comes from Clevo because their gaming laptops don't look like gaming laptops, and they offer 3-6 disk slots which we badly need. The result is acceptable, however, not quite as good as I had expected. Mine has i7-4700mq CPU which is more or less equivalent to an older i7 on the desktop, but its temperature is raised to 70-80C while turbo boost is on, even with the best thermal paste. My friend's i7-4801mq is worse — it could never stay at the advertised 3.6GHz for more than a few seconds before it burns up over 90 and starts to throttle. Its benchmark result is nearly identical to the 4700mq because of heat problems. And it's only 3.6GHz! The best i7 CPU on a desktop could easily run closer to 5GHz with 6 cores / 12 threads running!
So what should we choose next time? We're not looking for something cool or slim or light. We need real laptops which can at least run prime calculation at advertised turbo boost speed, full cores/threads for an entire day. A nice bonus would be manual fan control plus easy access to the fan for cleaning.
These high end chips are designed to run at those temperatures. The headline speed is what you get under ideal conditions, e.g. low ambient temperature.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Maybe you want desktops? Just a thought.
Desktops?
I have the last gen laptop that utilizes a mobile processor and I love it. It takes everything I can throw at it.
Definitely check out their new lineup, seems like it would be a perfect fit for what you are trying to accomplish.
-americamatrix
If all the laptops you've tried are failing to meet expectations perhaps you should look at your approach. Laptops are great for portability, but I've long since lost a desire to do development work directly on the laptop.
Rather having a strong backend that can spin up and host multiple VM's is much much more efficient for me. I also have less stress as my laptop isn't hampered with development / test software. I'm not sure what value you have in doing the calculation / testing on your lap vs in a lab with a remote connection.
Sounds like you may want a luggable PC rather then a laptop, unless battery operation is mandatory.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
They call it "turbo boost speed" precisely because you can't run at that speed for an entire day. Otherwise they would just call it "speed".
I don't know what you're doing with your laptops to cause such issues, are you working in the Sahara?
There are plenty of laptops out there but if you want a somewhat decent one, go for a Macbook Pro. Sure they're a bit more expensive (although not as expensive per feature as Dell) but I haven't had issues with them doing serious dev, cross-compilation and heavy computation (MATLAB, Python etc) work that can take 100% of all cores for days on end.
If you need desktop performance, get a desktop or get the building/compiling to work on your compile farm. A laptop with a desktop processor will overheat/melt/break and there are plenty of builders that will mash together whatever you specify without any real testing. And "boost" speeds are just that, they're only there to boost the occasional spike, physics will take over at some point. For the work you describe (prime calculations) you'll get much more efficiency out of a decent set of servers and have your coders check in their work after which a bot will automatically attempt compilation.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
And turn on your air conditioning. (or just get desktops)
Apple Mac Book Pro. Yup, I need to crank the fans to 6000 rpm when I am doing heavy duty 3D, image, video work, but it runs Windows 7 just fine.
What you need is a desktop....
I want to break the laws of physics. Please instruct me.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So what should we choose next time? What you are looking for is called a "desktop".
> We need real laptops which can at least run prime calculation at advertised turbo boost speed, full cores/threads for an entire day.
Intel says:
Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 allows the processor to operate at a power level that is higher than its TDP configuration and data sheet specified power for short durations to maximize performance.
Turbo Boost is designed to kick in for one to two seconds while rendering some enormously complex page or something. The CPUs are not designed to run at Turbo Boost speeds all day; so says Intel, and I suppose they know something about Intel processors.
Non-obligatory car analogy: Nitrous Boost would have been a more analogous name. It's used for seconds, like nitrous oxide, not all day, like a turbo can be.
Build high end workstations for half the cost at full performance then let your developers SSH into them and use them as their development environment. Add a reasonable vpn solution and you are good to go.
If you development environment is windows, bummer.
How about setting up a proper testing environment instead of trying to find unicorn laptops?
Why the need for laptops? Is it just a space issue or do these leave the area a lot? Maybe you should look at using some type of VM solution is possible. Lowish end laptops connected to something a little more hefty. These days that type of solution can be pretty mobile if the bandwidth is available.
Are you sure that you need to do things that way? Why on Earth don't you code on your laptop, and test on dedicated desktop machines?
You don't use a hammer to screw something in. You don't use a laptop for high performance applications, especially when your requirements start with "doesn't need to be small or light". This just has wrong tool for the job written all over it.
What sort of environment are these going to be in? An office environment, in the field, on an oil derrick, in a shack somewhere in the Gobi desert, something in between, or something else entirely?
Why must these machines be laptops and not desktops?
I have an ASUS G75VW-AH71, which I have had for several years now, and I run BIONC programs on it. So it runs at full load 24/7, both cpu and gpu. While it does get warm (75-76, avg cpu, gpu 40-60's depending on program) it never overheats or throttles. I'm not sure what environment they are running laptops in, as mine is in A/C in the summer. Dunno what their issue is, but I've never had a problem.
Lots of manufacturers have professional grade workstation laptops, why aren't you buying those? (Or as others suggested desktop PCs)
I have a Lenovo T540p with retina display (2880x1920) and my I7-4800MQ also can't run at full speed compiling software without machine-check-events hitting dmesg complaining about throttling due to heat.
I figured I just got a machine with bad paste from the factory. Is it really that wide-spread?
Interesting you post that, I was just on the hunt for a laptop for my mother...all of those brands have failed in the past.
They slow degrade and then eventually just act like they are infested with malware due to overheating. Sometimes even just shutting down from the temps.
If your demands are as high as yours, with the # of disk slots wanted, why don't you choose a desktop pc?
I had a similar issue on an Alienware M17X ( current generation ) where throttling and ultimately shutdown would occur once I started up a render that took all cores to 100%. The fact was the throttle wouldn't drop the cores fast enough before the temps mandated the shutdown. My fix was to simply disable the turbo feature so the cores never overheated in the first place.
I can now run all-core 100% usage renders all night long without a hiccup.
I've always preferred stability over bleeding-edge speed anyway.
( especially when an image or animation sequence takes anywhere from several hours to a day or two )
1) Desktops
2) You make a build|render|multi-core-operation-whatever-the-funk farm, and have your laptops RDP to it or start a job or something.
Seriously... unless you tell us you've got some specific operation that uses only laptops... everything you're discussing just sounds... retarded stupid.
You are wanting performance of the best tool for the job, but you want the functionality of the multitool.
Yes, I can remove a screw with my leatherman, but having a good screw driver does it much better. Same thing here you are using a leatherman and complaining that it doesn't work as well as a screw driver. But I cannot do much cutting with my screw driver.
Either you have to live with the limitations of what exist in the portable market, giving up some of the top end speed for the ability to be portable (at least semi-portable with these type of laptops) or give up portability for the performance you are wanting.
Turboboost for the day, that isn't what turboboost is for. It is for small boosts when the temperatures allow for it not something that will go all day.
There is always a tradeoff.
Ummm....
First, I think OP needs more context. It's hard to provide advice without knowing what your doing. For all we know your process is wrong.
We use top of the line Macbook Pros and typically have 3-4 VMs running our app with normal dev apps open (browsers, IDEs, etc)
Though since you havn't tried Macs, my guess is you are a windows shop. Macs with windows perform like trash compared to OS X so its probably not a solution.
I'm typically right up near my ram limit but it all seems to work alright ever since SSDs became mainstream.
that said, If the code is so nasty you can't run it on a laptop, you probably should stop trying.
It may be time to look at a desktop or a server cluster for your devs/test environments.
We have a number of development/test clusters up running in AWS. Some are partial services like elasticsearch and the code will namespace off a uniquely named index for you. The setup/tear down is also automated.
The last place I worked has a vmware cluster you could RDP into and work.
I just got an Acer Aspire V15 Nitro and one of the things I like about it, is that it runs quite cool even after compiling software for half an hour. Then again, that doesn't require the NVIDIA card to do anything, and I don't know how that would affect the temperature. As I just got it, my experience with it is limited, but I like it so far. It's a very fast machine.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I have this kind of laptop (an old Clevo D900F with a desktop Core I7 950). And those are the normal temperatures of the current gen (even old gen) under load. The new Clevo series (P650/670 SE/SG) are said to run cooler, maybe in the 60-70 range. But this comes at the cost of having both CPU and GPU soldered to the MB. Do not expect ANYTHING lower, even over the next year in the laptop market.
Consider elevating your laptop, or even using a cooler. It might help reducing from a couple of degrees to about 5.
A laptop is a hard thermodynamic environment. There's not much space to move air around, so with the low volumetric air flow rate, you get lower heat exhaust, so the internals tend to get hot. The hotter the components get, and the more often they stay that way, the more likely you are to get failures due to heat fatigue, which is pretty much inevitable with any laptop. If portability is required, you are pretty much stuck dealing with the issue, otherwise get yourselves some desktops (if still necessary, you can add water- or cryo- cooling to a desktop).
as an IT engineer in an analytical physics company, we ran into the same overheating issues but this was a process and workflow problem, not a laptop problem. Our users, most of which hold a PhD or patent or two, stamped their feet at having to use the ticket system and the scheduler for our high performance servers. we stopped giving them deskside compute systems with 96 gigs of ram because that was wasteful and in most cases they sat idle all day. We also enabled users to telecommute, and thats when shit hit the fan. Before we knew it we were dropping 8 grand on "mobile workstations" that would burn up and die after a year because analytics engineers would sit them on their laps and watch Big Bang theory on the couch all day. The hammer came down when we'd spent nearly 2 million on laptops for a single office and our failure rate was approaching 50%.
my advice is determine what your customer or users are doing and see if you can do it better a different way. Things that overheat a processor or lock up a laptop are good candidates for centralization in the datacenter. You'll always have prima donna users that want flagship laptops to do it the wrong way, so dont cave in. Gather MTTF and MTBF metrics to prove a case to your manager or C levels that things are getting out of control. Gaming laptops are meant to sell a marketing image, not actual sustainable performance. Finally, GPO and network firewalls are your friends. Sure, users can telecommute now but our fileservers do not communicate directly with their laptops, only the simulation cluster which they can only access through submitting jobs to the scheduler.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I run Dell precisions M6800 for CAD The fans are just a few screw away they do get a little hot when rendering but thats about it the fan control software is pretty good in this version of the dell previous where M6600's. I occasionally run throttle stop to keep it running full tilt when i run it on a lower watt power supply that some of the docks have for smaller Dell laptops. (this system really wants a 240 watt power brick)
Have you looked into the ASUS RoG laptops. I'm not sure if the latest models still have dual cooling fans, but the G74 model from a couple years ago that I own, has 2 discreet fans/heatsinks for CPU and GPU. I'm not sure if the current model G75 still has the dual fan setup or not. It was one of the few laptops that I could find that had that feature (as 2 of my previous laptops died from overheating problems). It's a big heavy gaming laptop, but packs a punch and has been great for me in regards to performance and heat issues.
Another one too look at that I haven't tried personally but has a good reputation is the MSI GT72 gaming/media models. These are the MSI equivelent of the ASUS model I mentioned above and also have dual fan/heatsink design.
Surprisingly, their Dragon series has been proving to be very impressive, and they seem to have the cooling issues well in-hand. Just don't expect much out of their undersized batteries, especially wide-open.
Based on the information so far, I don't understand why all the resources need to be directly in the laptop itself.
For example, having 3-6 disks running at 7200 RPM (or even down at 5400 RPM) will contribute to the heat problem. Have you considered replacing them with a SSD and then using a SAN or NAS for the remaining storage?
If you need a full i7 for the majority of your application but you need a laptop that keeps with the heat levels of an i3 then use an i3 laptop to access an i7 workstation.
If you are coding the application yourself, you should be able to use RPC to offload the high performance aspects of the application to the workstation. The other nice side effect of RPC is some parts of the application might even be able to run on more than one workstation at the same time.
If you do not control the code of the application (or refuse to do RPC), then look into one of the many ways to run an application remotely like RDP, X11, VNC, RedHat SPICE, HTTP, etc.
You seem to be trying to get a server to pretend it is a laptop which does not work well. I have seen the fans in 1U server struggle to keep up with the type of specs you are trying to use, the idea of getting it into space even smaller than a 1U cringe. Just let a laptop be a laptop and a server be a server.
I've seen a few external fan setups for laptops, but really have *no idea* if they have any noticeable benefits aside from putting a bigger airgap under the PC's base.
Aside from that I supposed you could look for GPU based software to handle heavy number crunching whenever possible. Fortunately it's becoming more common these days.
http://www.sagernotebook.com/h...
They've built for multiple companies at one time or another.
Their in-house systems tend to be beefy in the extreme and engineered right (powerful internal fans, rather than passive cooling).
Their desktop replacement are generally LOUDER than other laptops, but tend to have fewer problems overheating.
I'd call and talk with them about "Desktop Replacement" systems. And let them steer you towards what you're looking for.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The "best i7 CPU on a desktop" runs with one or more large, high speed fans and a large and heavy cooler inside a large enclosure that provides rapid heat exchange. How can you possibly be expecting to even approach this with a laptop?
You are the problem here. You've decided that you must have your hipster cool laptop development system while getting gamer desktop/xeon workstation performance. You are being unreasonable. Grow up and stop fucking around with benchmarks and thermal paste.
Whomever is funding all this happy horseshit would rather you just get some work done.
Like you, I've had reasonable performance from Clevo/Sager for software development. One thing I would possibly look for: Get the _heaviest_ laptop you can find with them. Those typically have much more aggressive cooling systems than the lighter models. Case in point: Sager 9377s at XoticPC. If you go to the gallery and locate the view of the bottom of the laptop, you'll notice multiple intakes with extensive venting out the back. XoticPC in particular can do a copper cooling upgrade which might be worthwhile to evaluate. (Haven't tried it personally)
I'm mentioning XoticPC in particular because I've gotten 3 or 4 laptops through them and have been happy. They're pretty slow to ship for custom options (they don't keep a ton of custom parts in inventory), but I've been happy with the customized product.
Laptops will always be a bit of a problem due to small packaging/weight requirements, but perhaps these tweaks can help get you there.
Why are you doing the actual development on a laptop? Business class laptops should only be dumb-terminal front-ends for real servers that you do your development on. You can connect to the server through VNC if you are linux based or mstsc.exe (RDP via Microsoft Terminal Services Client) so that your CPU intensive jobs get run on the server and not the laptop.
I regularly use VNC and RDP through VPN at 2560x1600 resolutions and hardly ever experience GUI lag these days. Doing your actual executions/simulations/etc on laptop doesn't really make a lot of sense.
You could do what I had to do when gaming on my previous laptop:
-USB powered cooling pad on the bottom (many companies make these, iirc mine was an Ultra)
-Small box fan set on high blowing across the top from the side
-Open window on other side of box fan
This was the only way it could handle high CPU loads without the keyboard getting so hot it would start to burn my fingers.
Granted this was an old Dell XPS from when laptop thermal management wasn't something they took into account.
You will benefit from the reviews at Notebookcheck.net.
For every machine they test precisely the thing that you are talking about. They run the laptop at maximum load and keep an eye on temperatures and CPU/GPU operating frequencies.
Facing a similar problem, I ended up choosing a Lenovo Thinkpad T440s (fully loaded), which gives me lots of battery life, a 3G modem to connect from everywhere (supported out-of-the-box by Ubuntu), and a set of high-end desktops and servers to do the heavy lifting. I get best of both worlds: I can develop and test things on my (still pretty fast) laptop, and once I have basic tests passing I push my code and remote-run jobs on more powerful servers that I don't really need to carry around with me.
Modern MSI g-series are the only ones that don't get very hot, depending on the configuration. You absolutely should switch to SSDs since they take a fraction of the power and 5400RPM drives are unacceptably slow. ASUS ROG ones overheat like crazy. Anything Dell or HP makes is a portable oven. Even Toshiba S-series models get fairly hot, as do the Qosmio ones.
One solution I used on an older overheating model was putting aluminum VRM coolers with 3M thermally conductive adhesive on all the VRMs on the laptop's motherboard and around the copper plate covering the chipset and CPU on all 4 corners. That cooled it down another 11F on average and they cost about $6 for a whole bag (imported from Hong Kong on ebay). You can also find low profile RAM coolers that attach directly to each ram module, at least on one side.
"We need real laptops which can at least run prime calculation at advertised turbo boost speed, full cores/threads for an entire day."
This is not really a viable specification. Laptops are NOT designed for 24/7 workloads. Anything like a 24 hour compute should be done on the compute farm, not your laptop. Your best bet is mini itx luggables.
Thermal paste isn't magic. I have a machine that's been running since 2005 without thermal paste. What you want is a way to remove heat quickly from the chips. That's not going to happen with the tightly packed frame of a laptop. I would suggest a custom frame of either copper and aluminum or aircraft aluminum with lot of holes and added fans. It'd be noisy, but wouldn't overheat as bad. You'd need to vacuum out the dust regularly. The best option would be to get a portable desktop.
The turbo boost is a temporarily increased max speed that it will run at as long as conditions allow. It's not guaranteed and shouldn't be expected to maintain it under a heavy load for the entire day. Sure, in the right desktop with really good cooling you may be able to sustain the boost speed for a long time but even there it is not a guaranteed speed. That would be the base speed of the processor not the boost speed. You will never be able to find a laptop that can fully match the performance of a desktop for this type of thing because dissipating that much heat requires space to move a sufficient volume of air and you don't have that in a laptop. If you truly need that much power you probably need to either look at actual workstations for people instead of desktops or combine decent laptops with VMs.
Honestly, I haven't found a good laptop that doesn't burn up. My experience HP, Compaq, Dell's have all had thermal issues. Worse yet, thermal issues that result in broken solder with the GPU or chipset or both. Have you ever turned on a laptop with nothing on the screen but blackness? Very common issue, even with Clevo based laptops. Resulting in me needing to use heat reflow with liquid flux.
I took every gaming cooling trick out of my bag, cause once you fixed the broken solder you have to prevent it from happening again. First I sanded the surface that touches the CPU and GPU flat as possible. Yes it's a lapping. Then I use black emery rouge compound with a dremel to get it smoother. Then some high quality non conductive thermal paste along with premium thermal pads like Fujipoly where needed. It makes a difference and non of my laptops go above 70C even under gaming.
The cooling in modern laptops aren't evolving as fast as the thermal output of these devices. Heat pipes aren't cutting it, and laptops should have started using water cooling. Yes, water cooling. Modern laptops use one or two heat pipes to cool the system where a simple water block would do a far better job. Desktop air coolers though use many heatpipes to keep the CPUs cool, while the GPU's enjoy wasting a PCI-E slot for its air cooler. With so many sealed water cooling desktop solutions, nobody bothered to make a laptop version?
I got one for about 1200 USD and it runs every game in the book and only overheats when I cover up the vents.
That is a big deal by the way, do NOT cover the vents.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I can not imagine a scenario in which something *has* to be local (ie, not a term into a cluster or HPC unit of some sort), *has* to be a laptop, and *has* to have 3-6 disk slots. Are you pretending you need the multiple slots for raid for performance reasons? Are you really going to claim that an SSD isn't fast enough for you? Perhaps you have to myopic of a view, or perhaps - and this is far more likely imo, you're part of the "engineers are Gods!" crowd, and the real answer is that the engineers want an uber-laptop they can take home for personal use, on their employer's dime. Seriously, *try* to justify why it has to have those specs. I dare ya.
I have used the Dell M6600 to death (literally, they had to change it for an M6700 towards the end of the second year), but I've ran renders and other intensive photo and video editing jobs on it and it took everything like a champ.
What they do best, though, is the next business day support thingie - you have a problem, you phone it in and the next business day a Dell engineer shows up with all the tools and replacement parts needed and the laptop is back on track.
I've given up on using the Precision, though, because I require less 3D rendering and more lighter equipment so I've switched to a Macbook Pro retina 15 and never looked back. I do, however, miss my old buddy, it took me out of some sticky situations simply by working properly under pressure.
But be advised, all workhorses break down, the difference is how the producers of the equipment deal with these situations. So far, I've been thoroughly unimpressed by the Apple Store where I took my Mac for poor performance issues, but the Dell dudes have always been 110% helpful and always came through.
no matter how a pc laptop is designed it still cannot match desktop version of it.
The Lumdy Blog Review|Tinashe PosesTopless On [lumdys.com]
Cover Of V Magazine
The Lumdy Blog Review|Sitcom's 'Friends' [lumdys.com]
Cast Enjoyed Reunion
The Lumdy Blog Review|Mike Tyson Had Sex with [lumdys.com]
Model Naomi Campbell in the Bathroom
The Lumdy Blog Review|Cameron Diaz Desperate for [lumdys.com]
Kids
The Lumdy Blog Review|Amy Poehler [lumdys.com]
Becomes Harvard University 2015 Woman of the Year 'Hasty
Pudding
The Lumdy Blog Review [lumdys.com]
Sort of going for a desktop where cooling is not an issue, I think Workstations are the only why to go. They tend to be more bulky, but for a reason. SSD too, as they use less power and run a lot cooler. I buy Dell Workstations for my company and run heavy CAD programs (Catia, UG) on them with rarely any issues. I think, even though you might not need it, a Quadro or Fire level video adapter in it would serve you well also. Off loading as much of that processing from the CPU would make it run cooler.
I don't want to be rude, but I think you have unrealistic requirements. Like, to the point of being silly.
As others point out, you're not going to get the "Turbo Boost" speeds all day long, since the whole point of the "Turbo Boost" speeds is to ramp up performance for short periods. You're looking for balls-out performance from laptops, whereas manufacturers have been pushing mobility and power-efficiency. And you're looking at gaming laptops for business use. It makes me thing that you don't know what you're doing.
My guess is-- and don't take this personally, I'm just basing this off of my experience with working with people who've asked for similarly unrealistic expectations-- that you don't actually need the kind of performance you're asking for. It is not "impossible to write code and run db/test environment" on a single laptop. People do that kind of thing all the time, and not even with very high-end machines. No, your performance will not be quite as fast as running on a super-high-end server, but it should be good enough for development work. If you want good performance, look to workstation-class laptops (e.g. Dell Precision laptops), get the best quad-core processor available, max out the RAM, and be sure to get a fast SSD. With that, you should be able to run a couple virtual machines with reasonable performance.
If that's not enough-- if you really need much faster performance, and you need to work on a laptop, then put your development environment on a server that you connect to remotely. Set up a big bad-ass powerful VM host, and give all the developers remote access to create VMs and connect to them. Use that whenever you're internet accessible, and only use a local VM when you're stuck without access. It's not complicated.
I have a Asus G75vx it's a i7 16gb bluray-burner buy mine in december 2013 for less than 1500$ I just upgraded the HDD to 1tb-ssd and 2tb-spinning.
It have very BIG air vent in the back like 12% of the laptop size are vent.
I use it for gaming and compiling, never run over 50-60C.
The support from Asus is a very great.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
..them to run cooler.
They don't teach thermal management to EE's or ME's. The two groups each work on their own portions of the laptop and then cram a heat pipe and fan assembly into the case that the heat pipe supplier says might work. Thermally conductive thermoplastics have been around for decades yet they never seem to make it into laptop enclosures. Some are more thermally conductive than aluminum and are are not too costly for them to be incorporated into the design.
There is a new open laptop project at Open Lunchbox starting up that intends to provide open reference designs for enclosures that use the enclosure as part of the cooling system.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
And doing all that computation on a laptop is a huge hassle. Get some remote dedicated servers and run your heavy calculations on those. I'm paying about $40 a month for an i7-3770 with 32GB of ram and 2x 3TB disks and a gigabit internet connection (20TB monthly traffic included), or could get an E3-1245v2 with ECC for a little bit more (hetzner.de online auction). I don't run any public services on it, it's just a personal computer that happens to be online 24/7 and sit in a data center 1000's of miles away, but I've shovelled all my compute and storage intensive stuff on it and it's wonderful and liberating. It's not really "cloud" like an EC2 server, it's a rented, dedicated box that I'm completely in charge of.
If you are running cores are 100% on a routine basis, Turbo Boost should be disabled for maximum stability. It's really that simple. Additionally, a good IT solutions professional will provide management a financial model that shows the ROI of routine an regular hardware upgrades. For development work, don't be stupidly bound to 3-5 year IT lifecycles especially if a newer CPU generation will yield big productivity gains.
laptop coolers are cheap when you're planted for a bit. I have a couple of them but with my new setup I'm finding I don't need to use them. I have an ASUS G751JY with the I7-4710HQ processor right now, no overheating problems. It's more of a luggable desktop than a laptop and for everything else I have servers and big desktops to handle the workload.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
They are going to need a BIG fan too.. Maybe a can of freeze spray for the times you just need another few seconds of top speed...
OR.. Just get a desktop and remote in to the test environment... That only requires a modest network with low latency...
Laptop day
See you there
Turbo boost
Turboing
Want to say
Why a game machine
But I'm just
Mumbling
With my freeze spray
I will stop the heat
With my freeze spray
I will install a CPU
A much too big CPU
Tell you how
Jam it in
Make it work
A laptop case
Like a fool
Kind of sick
Special needs
Anyways
With my freeze spray
I will stop the heat
It's not some heat paste or a big fan
That's all Ars Technica
I just think you need time to know
That I just want a gaming machine
I'm finally going to come clean
I'll say what I actually mean
Play games on a company machine
That's the plan
Halo 2
You and me
Any day
Why a game machine ... keen"
("What?")
"No I . . I, uh . . . compiling's
Anyway
With my freeze spray I will stop ?
I do some 3D rendering. I had an Intel i7 that run at 3.4 GHz with turbo boost. Rendering large scenes with Luxrender, Vue or 3Delight causes temperatures to reach 160 degrees F and the ran runs louldy. I had to buy a desktop because I was afraid I would ruin the laptop. I then gave my laptop to my dad who does uses it for his home office (MS Word, Excel).
The 3D progams run fine one my destop. AMD processor runs hot though. I might need to change the heatsink or add another fan. At least I can add an extra fan to the case of a desktop computer to expel the hot air.
i tried looking for portable servers, but this seems close enough
for real power get off the batteries then look at systems that use workstation or server type motherboards
im sure there are others out there, or just find a luggable case that you can put in your favorite motherboard and raid
http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/portable-workstations
A MacBook Pro with a Quad core i7 does pretty well and doesn't overheat even when rendering video with Dreamweaver.
You're getting a Dell. I know you mentioned you already tried this brand and they overheated however I think I can direct you in the correct direction. Disclaimer though I am a huge fan of Dell and pretty much use all their products (enterprise line) at home. The trick is to not get the consumer models. Insprin: Consumer Latitude: Business (Sales, Marketing etc) Precision: Developers / enterprise grade. We had an issue for over a year with Latitudes that would spike in their CPU usage, pinned at 100% and wouldn't release. If we shut the computer down it would be ok for a minute or two when we power it back up then it would go back into the same pattern. I obviously thought it was a virus or inefficient program running in the background. Here is what happened, it was overeating and as a "feature" the CPU would step down it's clock automatically to reduce the heat output. It was just confusing. The fix for this situation is to run the laptop with the case open, top up so the heat vents upwards. having the top closed creates a blanket effect. I have an Asus G73SW and the same thing happens when I crunch data. This particular model though I have had for a while and it only started doing it after a year or two so it just needs to be de-dusted. Same issue though. There are some great comments about desktop models though. I personally use desktop and server models for work now. Right now I'm on a Precision T7500 tower that I got on eBay a year ago for like $290. The specs are very similar to an R600 / R700 server which starts at around ~$3k. The mobo supports up to 196GB of ram, has plenty of drive space, onboard raid (get a raid card though for performance), plenty of space for adding dedicated video cards and extra fans, also supports dual procs. Not bad for the price before I upgrade the parts. Altogether I'm at 24GB ram, 16x logical cores and some other goodies for under $1k. You should also make sure your developers have access to servers. Instead of trying to run everything on their laptops I would advise setting up some dedicated dev / sandbox servers. Perhaps provision a DB server that can be shared and a web server for staging / testing or sandbox purposes.This just helps offload some of the infrastructure load their laptop would normally have to shoulder. In the end some stuff will be run locally and some will be on dev servers (if you have them). So remember, don't get the shitty lines, go for the Precision. If you have a laptop that is docked, make sure the lid is open and get them a company issue tiny-fan. Laptop: Dell Precision M6700 or M6800 or whatever the current model is. Desktop: Dell Precision T7500 or T7600 or the next model up (recommended, tons of room). Oh yeah these workstations are also BIG. It's like the size of a small person and people always chuckle if I have to pick one up and move it around because it looks so absurdly big compared to other models. It's fun for sure.
I have both a MB Pro and a Clevo laptop. The MacBook Pro sits in a corner gathering dust, because the Clevo is a more capable machine for the work I'm doing.
But one thing you might try is reducing the load on your machine. The latest and greatest IDE is fine, but you do pay a cost for it. A tool like vim will put a much smaller load on your system. Even a lighter weight IDE might be workable. I love CLion, for instance, but for large projects it crushes the machine. I can work on the same project in QtCreator and everything is happy. QtCreator's refactoring tools aren't as nice, but they're good enough. But for personal projects I have started moving to vi and command line only tools. It's not for the faint of heart, but it can be done.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
https://system76.com/laptops/b...
Yeah, this... I got a Macbook Pro late last year to use as a dev box. I did manage to learn some of the dazzling array of shortcut keys and got used to their touchpad gestures somewhat quickly. But the thing gets hot pretty fast, and I can already hear the fan starting to grind and struggle a bit. It gets hotter than the i7 Lenovo z710 I bought for my wife last year.
To be fair, the Lenovo has lots of other problems... they threw in the crappy Intel AC 7260 wifi/bluetooth chip, which just plain didn't work (it simply drops the connection every 5-30 minutes, and is terrible maintaining connections with any sort of distance and congestion - my wife has had to resort to plugging in to the wired ethernet in the basement to actually get any work done). Supposedly Intel finally released a HW rev that addresses some of the issues, I need to try to contact Lenovo to see if they'll replace it in warranty. Also, the Lenovo seems to grind to a halt every once in a while for no reason. I replaced the HDD with a nice Samsung 850 SSD, but it still seems to do this. Might be Win8.1 , but Win8.1 seems to work fine on the crappy little HP Stream 7 Atom tablet we just picked up.
Thinkpads, specifically the W series, just go for it..
The temps you mention are OK, mobile processors are designed to run at higher temps
Dont expect to run on max turbo all the time, not even a stock desktop can do that
Macbook Pro
Best luck I've had with high performance laptops have been Alienware laptops as their cases have tended to allow better cooling that others I have tried. But if you are talking about more than 2.4GHz processors, then you really need to start looking at desktops. It just isn't feasible with laptops.
Perhaps those jobs should be sent to a datacenter with high computing power. Users should access to them using some remote connection if they want real power processing or stay happy with the right power processing in their laptops. Other alternative could be exploring the possibility of docking the notebook in some coolant docker. Perhaps a 80 dollars minirefrigerator under their desks would do it. :) But in that case a desktop computer would be more portable :P
What you need is servers. Laptops aren't designed to work like that. You could possibly get away with custom desktop PCs with crazy cooling but if you're pushing envelopes all day every day laptops are a piss poor excuse for productivity. You could get some high end laptops for local processing, and push all the major work to a few dedicated servers or even a blade system if you really needed sustained calculations. But laptops are not and most likely won't be designed for all this. Some other posters have pointed out that "sustained" top processing throttles down periodically because turbo boost is only made to kick in when absolutely necessary. It heats up the processor and it has to throttle or it'll melt.
So unless you're willing to haul around a liquid cooling system in your enormous gaming laptop (which someone has probably done), you're barking up the wrong physics.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
i realise several people have said it already, but i wanted to add that i bought a macbook pro with the 2560x1600 LCD, dual core with 8gb of RAM and it wasn't until loadavg went above 4.0 for over a minute that i even realised that it had a fan at all. it's an aluminium case (watch the edges: they are actually quite sharp).
now, people may say they are expensive but i managed to get hold of one that had been imported into the UK, and had a US keyboard, it was only $USD 1500 where all the ones with UK keyboards were $USD 2,000. given the resolution of the screen and the amount of RAM i considered it to be a serious major bargain and a long-term investment: i anticipate running this machine for at least 5 years.
now, the only down-side is that it has a 256gbyte SSD, which these days is quite small. it does however have USB3 so can use external ultra-fast USB3 SATA drives. but that's not the main down-side: the _real_ problem is that in the EU, power is not earthed properly. so when you plug the PSU in, there is considerable EMI which can actually give you an electric shock if you happen for example to put your foot on a metal radiator.
checking in /var/log/syslog it was *swamped* with SATA resets, so much so that i actually had to move to a tmpfs for /var/log and restart all services so that they used it (there are better ways to do this). the debian page for macbook pros with SSDs describes a workaround which carries out a reset on the SATA device (i forget what it is) but i found that this was *nowhere near* adequate, even if added to a cron job and run every single minute. the problem was of course compounded by the fact that each SATA reset was accompanied by a syslog message which, of course, resulted in a write, which, of course, went wrong, causing another reset. by moving /var/log to a tmpfs i broke the loop, and the resets only occur every 5 to 30 seconds, which i can live with.
it's actually good that i'm running debian because if this still had a proprietary OS on it there would be nothing i could have done about the problem.
anyway, _despite_ this, i would *still* recommend 100% getting a macbook pro [and replacing its OS]. the screen is awesome: i left xterm at its default font size, very quickly got used to the tiny characters, and - get this: i can fit *TEN* 80x51 xterms on one screen! i think that's absolutely hilarious, and for programming it's absolutely amazing. currently i have 4 xterms *on the same screen* with a firefox window that's at 1300 x 1200 pixels! i could make it more but i find that web pages don't really properly stretch beyond that as they're usually designed for around 1200 pixels wide at the most, these days.
so, yeah - get macbook pros but please for goodness sake dump the OS.
My tests show that laptop cooling stands with large fans that force ambient air into the lower shell vent openings help the machines run 5 to 10 degrees C cooler. Cost starts about $40 for an effective one. Start at NewEgg if you haven't looked at these before. There are even models that are designed to let you use the notebook computer on your lap using a padded cooling stand.
I will second Sager, I have been very pleased with my Sager NP8255-S (aka Clevo P157SM). I is going into its 2nd year now. I ended up choosing the Sager because:
1. strong i7 cpu
2. up to 32gb ram
3. supports four hard drives
Actually "four hard drives" for this model means 2 x 2.5" and 2 x m2 slots. Which is huge, compared to the alleged mainstream performance workstations like Dell's Precision line or HP's z-books or Lenovo's W-series.
I'm running 3 x 400gb ssds in a raid 0 and I find that disk-intensive workloads are pleasingly fast.
I am getting the following in PassMark's Performance Test 8.0:
overall disk score: 5,558
seq read: 715 MB/sec
seq write: 523 MB/sec
random rw: 300 MB/sec
(just for the record, I run regular backups because because of the potential fragility of raid-0).
Why not a 4-drive raid? I figured I'd save a 2.5" slot for a multi-terabyte disk some day for on-board archives once I fill up the ssd's. (And I still have the optical bay to drop a caddy in if I need more storage).
Until 8x pcie ssd devices are available in laptops, raiding SATA together seems like the best way to boost lugable disk performance.
It loosk like the NP9752-S is the current model of this machine.
Now... if if you're looking for insane power in a laptop form factor, take a look at Eurocom's Panther.
If you really need crazy CPU cycles, this seems like a good choice:
PassMark for xeon E5-2687W v2
Here are the specs; I didn't go with the Panther because the cost-curve didn't work for me (money actually is an object in my case).
All-in-One Server with XEON 12-cores/24-threads, integrated display, keyboard and built in UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply)
WEIGHT/DIMENSIONS: 5.5kg (12.1lbs); 419(W)x286(D)x57.9-62.1(H)mm (16.76x11.44x2.31-2.48inch)
SECURITY: TPM 1.2; Fingerprint, Kensington Lock
OPERATING SYSTEMS: Microsoft: Server 2012, 2008R2; VMware, VMware ESXi; Linux; RedHat 6.4 Enterprise Server Edition
CORE LOGIC: Intel C600/X79 Express Chipset
PROCESSOR: 12-core, 10-core, 8-core and 6-core Intel XEON E5-2600 and E5-2600 v2 series; up to E5-2697 v2 (12-cores/24-threads); socket LGA2011
MEMORY: up to 32GB; DDR3-1333/1600/1866; four physical SODIMM sockets
EXPANSION: Built-in ExpressCard 34/54 slot (for optional Expansion box required for Dual/Quad Port or Fiber LAN Adapter for i.e. for VMware ESXi)
STORAGE: up to 8TB of storage with four physical HDD or SSD, RAID 0/1/5/10 support; SATA 6Gb/s
NETWORK:on-board 1Gbe LAN (Intel 82579V); 2nd or Dual-port LAN Adapter(s) available via ExpressCard slot or via external expansion Magma box
OPTICAL DRIVE BAY: DVD-RW or Blu Ray Burner or 4th Hard Drive
I/O PORTS: 3x USB 3.0; 2x USB 2.0; eSATA; Firewire-800 (TI XIO2221ZAY); DisplayPort v1.2; DVI-I (SL); HDMI 1.4a out w/HDCP; Headphone; Microphone; S/PDIF out; Line-in; RJ-45 / LAN
I'm a bit confused. How did Apple support respond when you opened a request for your Macbook Pros?
We need real laptops which can at least run prime calculation at advertised turbo boost speed, full cores/threads for an entire day.
What the hell are you trying to do with these things? Is the NSA starting up a mobile service now?
My last laptop was a Sager and it cooked itself to death. Also watch out for the Sager logo itself. It peels up on the corner and is quite sharp. I cut by finger pretty bad and I had had to extract part of the letter "r" from my finger with tweezers.
Ok, so the OP wants a desktop i7 chip in a laptop case that doesn't overheat. Hmm. Ain't gonna work, pal!
You can have fast, cool and portable - but pick two. All laptops are at best a compromise from a thermal design/cooling point of view and if you add desktop chips that aren't designed to really run cool, because powerful cooling is assumed, you are asking for the impossible. BTW, this is the same (or even worse) on mobile devices - a today's smartphone cannot run on full power for more than about 15 minutes before it overheats and shuts down.
There simply isn't enough cooling, because customers are asking for devices that are smaller, slimmer, less noisy, ideally fanless, all the while demanding high performance. There used to be times when a laptop could run with power management disabled and at worst it was a bit noisy and the battery drained quicker. Modern laptop will fry itself if you disable it.
Do you really really REALLY have to have laptops? For running those test databases on? I know, laptop is cool, but can't you, you know, have a server farm to connect to instead? Do your engineers lug those machines somewhere constantly? Doubt it, those gaming machines are neither robust nor lightweight to lug around on a daily basis.
And a waste of time and money. Are these supposed to be game machines or business machines? Come on....
-Matt
I have a custom-built Clevo 15.6", i7 4910MQ, 32 GB RAM, nVidia 780M, Samsung 512GB SSD.
I use it for 3d rendering, video editing and the like. It's small footprint, low noise and portability make up for the reduced performance compared to a desktop.
I have it for a year now and I never noticed overheating. I often let it work overnight.
So maybe it's just the way yours are built that doesn't the air flow normally.
I am a strong proponent of running a laptop as a dummy terminal that connects with both a high power desktop and a cluster/server/supercomputer. Various configurations work fine, but I've been happy with the speed/latency of using VNC over a VPN. The only issue comes in high latency (satelite) internet, which various regions of the country are constrained by. The cluster/server/supercomputer interface can either be through a batch scheduler, or SSH or whatever. Further, if the cluster and the high power desktop are co-located, data can be quickly transferred between them or they can both be served by the same data server.
Why not have some high end desktops or servers, and use remote desktop software while handing out mid range laptops? Why must you heavy computing be done locally? There are a lot of solutions to remote computing.
Use a desktop at the office with all the bells and whistles you need. And have a second device when on the run. You can sync both via the source repositories you are using.
Furthermore, the setup will teach you not to frickle together your build system. And the desktop PC environment can be better. adjusted to ergonomic requirement. Also adding 2 or 3 monitors is easy.
Move your computational work to cloud servers.
A properly equipped workstation laptop (read: Lenovo W series Thinkpads, or Dell Precision) would have to be configured deliberately low for that to happen.
If one were to consider something on the order of a larger W series Thinkpad (W540, for example), there would be plenty of room to not only outdo that buildbox, but to also have room for a long service contract, a feature that OP's company may want.
Yes, these kind of laptops do get hot, but it's not as if manufacturers haven't paid attention to getting it right.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I know the OP mentioned fan cleaning, but I wonder if these overheating problems are immediate or after some weeks or months of use? I have found that modern laptops seem to gunk up their heat sinks much faster than they used to, or at least have much less headroom to tolerate the reduction in cooling capacity. A machine that has become unreliable or slow due to thermal throttling usually bounces back to perfect function after a good cleaning.
I have to inspect and clean my laptop heatsinks as often as every 6 months, whereas with older laptops I might not bother before a replacement was due for other reasons after a few years. This is in a relatively clean environment, so I can imagine doing it sooner in a very dusty work location.
On my Thinkpads, the keyboard can be easily removed to access the main cooling fan. I shine a bright LED flashlight in through the fan shroud and inspect the narrow channels and fins of the heat-sink by viewing the light coming out the little side vents of the machine. I push a thin strip of polycarbonate (such as from some product packaging bound for the recycling bin) down each channel to break loose any visible clumps of dust and fibers, and use a vacuum cleaner to suck out all the loose stuff until the channels and fins look clean to the eye. I imagine a nice stiff-haired brush with long bristles might work here, but I never seem to have one on hand when I need to clean like this. I use a plastic strip that can go all the way from the outside of the machine, through the heat sink channels, and into the central fan shroud.
Note: insert something into the fan blades to prevent them spinning while you apply the vacuum cleaner to the top of the fan or any of the side vents. You do not want to spin the blades up and stress out the fan bearings with such a high airflow going through the ducts! It goes without saying that the machine is powered off during all of this cleaning.
When our developers do builds (which, including tests, would take many hours on a laptop), their build script spins up a big Amazon Instance (currently c3.4xlarge) and does the build there. That gives them 16 cores of CPU + 30 GB of RAM and 2 160GB SSD's (in RAID-0).
Average use per developer is around 4 hours/day which costs around $75 per developer per month and it gets the build & test time to under 2 hours. We tried a larger instance (32 cores + 60GB of RAM) for twice the price, but it made little difference in the build time.
Get a super-computer!
It should hold you for a while......
OK, maybe a little more than a few.... bucks...
I'm using the Sager NP9570 / Clevo P570WM which uses Intel's LGA 2011 socket and supports the best desktop and server processors, like the Intel Core i7-4960X with 6 cores/12 threads, and the Xeon E5-2697 v2 with 12 cores/24 threads which I'm personally using and doesn't overheat running at 100%.
Run your intensive tasks on a compile farm, not on your laptops. It will save you a lot of time, money and aggravation.
he's silly. you want a desktop class workstation in a laptop form factor, and don't want it getting hot.....
better off with lightweight computers that remote in to high powered virtual servers.
It gets hotter than the i7 Lenovo z710 I bought for my wife last year.
Are you looking at actual CPU temps or just going by feel? Keep in mind that aluminum conducts heat rather well, while the plastic case of that z710 is an insulator. The case of a MacBook does get hot as it also acts somewhat as a heatsink, but that would make the hardware in that case cooler, not hotter.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
For example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWeK-aOWCFg
This guy (search for him on youtube) looks like he played with all of them. He will let you know which one throttles (looks like a lot of premium gaming devices) and which one does not. This very one looks line not.
Your porcs will run cooler and you'll have reams of RAM to spare.
You may be looking for a 'Lunchbox' style case.
I've seen these in military applications, it's a portable case (like a laptop, but thicker) that will let you use full-size ATX mobos.
One model (below) actually lets you fold three displays out of it (The "FieldGo M3")
This would give you the performance and cooling of a desktop, and (almost) the portability of a laptop.
http://www.bsicomputer.com/pro...
1) The submitter could be living in some shared squat space in SFO where the space for a desktop would be a luxury. The cost of housing is prohibitively expensive in some areas and frankly, even though Los Angeles isn't quite to that level, I find myself cramped enough in my 350 sqft studio apartment that I ended up selling my Powermac G5 because I kept kicking it with my shin everytime I squeezed between the desk and the couch. I have literally no space in my apartment for a desktop. I use a laptop sitting askew on my desk, hooked to an external monitor (hooray! dual screens), and have the freedom to just pack the laptop up and go to my gf's house, or to work, whatever (daily occurence). I don't necessarily need the full power of a desktop, but due to my filmmaking efforts I really use the discrete graphics and some storage options for desktops. Basically: Visual Studio, Adobe CC suite, World of Warcraft, and Chrome is where I spend 99.9% of my time.
I'm currently contemplating the MSI WS60 (Core i7 4710MQ?, 16gb RAM, 2x128gb SSDs in RAID0, 1x1TB 7200rpm spinner, Quadro something or other) and GS60 Ghost Pro something something (same as WS60 but with 6gb nVidia GTX 970m and no thunderbolt). Both are available with 4k screens, but that's overkill for my purposes (external monitor for that).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
And it's only 3.6GHz!
I LOLed.
It would helped if you have specified the workloads you are after.
Otherwise, laptops with best termal control I have seen were HP and Apple. But those, again, are laptops, not a slim portable servers. Laptops will always suck at this, because they are, duh, laptops: they are designed to be portable, not being capable of dissipating >300W of waste heat. They are also designed not to burn wholes in your pants, if you per chance would decide to put the laptop on your, well, lap.
I have personally in the past used a plain PC tower as a compile farm for software development. The laptop was old (very old) and compiling anything large-ish on it was a huge chore (and waste of time). I have configured the distcc to simply run all compilation of the PC instead. Work and compile in the quiet of the bedroom, while noisy and hot PC, compiling stuff full time on its four cores, stays in the guest room.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
The Dell XPS 15 Touch. It's amazing.
I encode video and run FEM simulations that max out all of the cores on my Dell M4600 all the time. It hasn't really given me any issues.
Why does testing NEED to happen on the same system? Why do you need all these high end laptops just to code? How much of your budget are you sinking into this?
For my development studio, we have one single centralized VMWare server that is beefy as fuck for all of our application and database testing. We simply either remote desktop or samba/nfs share into each of our environments that we need to work in.
This keeps things clean and centralized for all of us, allows us to work from ANY machine (such as the 1.6GHz Celeron I'm using to post this right now), and not have to worry a single bit about performance on an individual machine basis. Whenever we need more resources, we simply upgrade the centralized server environment and everyone benefits, without the need to reconfigure each end users machine, or outright replace them (because who the hell has the ability to upgrade laptops these days?)
Temps were around 80 degree, but they stayed there and I had to enable the turbo fan (Fn+1) mode which made it really loud. (Yes, I also have some normal systems which were also calculating stuff 24/7 during that time.)
Oh,.. and yes, my laptop is still working fine.
The guy complaint about laptop running hot - of course it does
Get a desktop - and suddenly the user will found that desktop is about 10x faster than their laptop.
The drive is faster, the GPU is faster - there are actuall slot that you can put card in (WOW)
Get them some rack mount workstations, and have them remote into them with any old netbook/notebook/tablet whatever... Then they could be mobile AND productive.
I too (like one of the commenters) have a last gen OriginPC (EON) with SATA SSD and RAID 1 mirrored mSATA SSDs and am satisfied with it and OriginPC's support.
... er ... TRANSPORTABLE (luggable) server, check out the Eurocom Panther.
I bought one of those laptop protector stands to keep the furnace away from my lap and discovered that it was just extra stuff and that I just didn't need it: everything runs reasonably cool even over multiple days.
...not on battery, which lasts, at best, an hour.
However, if what you really want is some kind of portable
It's your hernia and you won't be using on any airline flights.
Question: will you be configuring some kind of RAID other than 0 or 1 with your multiple drive slots?
Nobody suggested a Macbook.
So what, if you aren't running OS X? They are well-made, they have proper thermal management, they won't burn themselves up. You can certainly run Windows or Linux.
As others mention, turbo-boost is meant for short bursts, and nothing more. If you need full-out performance, get a machine that's made for it. That means NOT a laptop.
4 disks in a laptop is insane. Why? Why do you need 4, physically-separate, power-hungry drives? Make it one flash drive that is big enough. For most uses, if you ARE using OS X, then Fusion drive (big flash cache + hard drive) will perform just as well in most applications. (Only use case I can think of where it might not would be video editing, where the size of projects might exceed the size of the flash).
Move to Maine
You don't specify why your requirements require a laptop. You talk about doing things "all day" so certainly you are not on battery power all day.
For me I require the portability of a laptop, such that I can move to conferences with my machine and do presentations, or go to coffee shop to work. However, I never need battery power, and am always near an outlet.
The right all-in-one will give you that portability, power, and cooling, but you'll be tethered to an outlet. In the rare case I don't want to shutdown my apps between outlets, I shutdown using hibernate.
I use a Thinkcentre e93z, and for a case I found the ILugger 23, which is intended for a Mac all-in-one, but the internal dimensions matched my machine.
I have an ASUS ROG G75. I can hammer the ever living hell out of it all day and it barely warms up. The cooling is a high flow system that flows all the way through to vent at the back. It does not pull from the bottom or vent from the bottom (who the retarded designer is that thought that was good I will never understand).
yes, it is big. But it is also very portable and packs a LOT of horsepower.
I almost never found any laptop which keep its mojo when overheating.
(Disclaimer, -I still use a/am a fetishist of a- Thinkpad T60 for all my programming+non-gfx works, but am always test-driving new PC laptops at work for co-workers so they know the real practical limit of their machines -- I'm one of the few programmer there and all the other co-workers are artists doing video/vfx/3d edits and rendering, and whenever a new kid has a new overpriced shiny laptop supposed to never choke on 4k pre-renders or similar, trololol there comes 38 celcius + unbearable humidity and they are sad -- both pc and mac -- )
The only practical way to level up the default heat capacity from most laptops is to add an external air cooling/redistribution device (Ghetto Setup) but it defeats the purpose of being a laptop.
Ex: What I did with my old T60, I've took a normal Desktop fan, wired it to a 12V rechargeable Batt+Transfo and fixed the fan to a clip holder. So I have this MadMax-esque contraption which keeps me working wherever I go (you should see the hipsters in coffee shops looking at me, (+ I have a Mac Sticker on the middle of the lid .)) whatever the temperature, but I am happy when a coworker lend me a little notebook for client meetings. Another example, my mom bought a 2000$ Dell to get on facebook (Ughhh) but it chokes when its too hot and she went to get a big clunky USB undermat with fans at Staples.
The other option as others have pointed out, Desktop.
From a user's point of view, "hot" probably means "hot to the touch" and not "CPU die temp is higher." I don't want to rest my hands on my heatsink.
Do you forget where you're posting?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Let me tell you about mine. I have an 8 year old "workstation" class machine that is basically a dumb terminal running web browser, editor, xserver and a couple other things. It has 4 monitors raised to eye level, and a keyboard that is probably larger than your laptop. The whole setup spans the corner of my desk where I sit in a really comfortable chair, leaned back slightly.
About 50' away, through two doors is a room that sounds like a jet engine lab full of modern servers and disks in racks.
All the data is stored on a network attached server with SAN attached IO. It takes regular automatic snapshots of everything in mine and my co workers "home directories" and rolls them regularly to tape on a daily basis.
When I need to build some code, I hit a key in my editor and it tells an enormous build box (with multiple GB/sec of IO to the disk storage system) in the lab to spin up a shit ton of CPU's and built my code. When its done, I run it on another cluster of machines.
When I leave work, I carry a light weight laptop (sometimes just an ipad) and use RDP to connect to the workstation at my desk. In the rare case that I don't have internet access, I can usually find some documentation or other "lightweight" laptop appropriate work to do that doesn't require a connection to more hardware than you will ever be able to carry in your backpack.
As others have said, you might consider analyzing your workflow.
They do exist.
Obvious but had to be said, as nobody else has mentioned it.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
That thing between your legs is more of a time sink than a heat sink
Look at a Lenovo W540. I've got an older W530 model but its basically a workhorse and seems to have good cooling.
Max CPU while working remotely for extended periods of time? If you're going to hack mobile devices in public at least pipe the traffic you're snooping to a server grade box somewhere. For the reduction in cost of some chrome books for your crew vs. a herd of gaming laptops you can afford a van to park out front of the coffee shop with an inverter, server and wifi...
Crank up the building AC to 0F or open a few windows if your in Chicago, overheating problem solved.
Just dump the laptop into an aquarium full of mineral oil:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php
Problem solved, heat dissipated.
Using the keyboard would be a little slippery but that may actually be a feature if you're a pr0n aficionado.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
http://web.eurocom.com/ec/showroom%281%29ec
Their panthers are more or less portable desktops with an attached screen.
OriginPC laptops are just rebranded Clevo laptops (same as what Sager do).
The OP is currently using Clevo laptops, probably the same vintage as yours.
You can either have the coders work in a cold room, or you can pipe chilled, compressed air to the cooling intake of their workstation. Injecting cold air from 100 PSI to atmospheric pressure results in a temperature drop of about 60F. As long as its dry, you won't have any condensation problems. ...Or you could just buy a tower server and a cheap laptop for each of them.
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
I would recommend a Sager notebook, basically they are portable desktop computers crammed into laptop enclosures. Ideally, the fans on some models are easy to clean and maintain, they should have some fan manipulation options plus you can custom design the bloody thing as you maintain it yourself.
I am fed up with MSI, Asus, Abit, servicing dells on behalf of a retail supplier of said pos's and managed to help please customers during nearly 10+ years of service to an ISP by fixing their damn computers.
You must upgrade your humanoid or compatible bio neural firmware, did I just make that up ?. You'll find the most powerful 'processor' between your ears, just give it better software ;-) also it doesn't have overheating problems or clock speeds to worry you. So much better than the simplistic Von Neumann architectures that you spend so much money on.
they're made for this...
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure(1,224,0)ec
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/productsg(6)ec
good support.
70-80C in a notebook is NOT overheating. They can take up to 100C.
You CAN tell when it's overheating IF the CPU starts to thermally throttle, or worst case just shuts down.
WTF are these people coming from nowadays? /. should be chanmed to news for the technically illiterate who ask stupid questions.
I was referring more to the user's point of view than the heatsink. That said, you eventually learn to work right through and it's no longer a time sink.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Chuck in an SSD drive???
Since when does writing code and performing DB tests require a super fast CPU? I would think that the DB tests could generate the most load, most of which would be more dependent on IO then CPU. I use my desktop and I think the games I play put way more load on the CPU then my work ever does.
Not sure if you consider a 12 pound computer a laptop but here is the Eurocom Panther 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA8G_OOT-A0 .
I realize this isn't politically correct (and the obvious omission from your list make that clear) but:
You left on the one brand that actually has thermal performance considered and simulated: Apple.
Apples are Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, and Windows multi-bootable. Or you can can VM all of the same.
Thermal performance is something that is rarely a problem IME with Apple laptops.
It is very easy question.
You would live in Svalbard islands and use your laptop outside.
Get some excellent dell precision mobile workstations (ie. M6800 or M6700) - They even come with IPS screens.
Hey a friend sent me this post. If Origin PC's new EON laptops are of interest hit me up on Twitter @originpcceo or email our sales team.