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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.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Maybe you want desktops? Just a thought.
Desktops?
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 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 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.