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.

Comments

wrong tool for the job

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Never had such issues

[guruevi]

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.

Disable the turbo

[nehumanuscrede]

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 )

Re:Seems obvious but...

[ShanghaiBill]

I was thinking about a huge fan myself

I use a small $10 desktop fan from Walmart. When I am running something compute intensive on my laptop, I turn on the fan, point it at the laptop, and no more heat problems. I also use this laptop stand (cost: $8) which allows the air to circulate all around the laptop. One more trick: If you use your laptop closed, with an external monitor, then flip it over, so the bottom (which gets the hottest) is up. That way you maximize the convection.

Re:Seems obvious but...

[Andy Dodd]

For the price they'll spend on an ultra-high-end laptop (I'm guessing stuff that meets their requirements will be in the $2000-3000+ range), you can get a mid-low range desktop that still blows it away in performance AND a midrange laptop you can remote into the beast with.

I stopped buying high-end laptops long ago. I do a lot of Android platform development in my spare time - most of the time I do it on a Chromebook running Crouton, remoted into a quad-Haswell i5 buildbox with 16GB RAM and multiple 256GB SSDs. (Actually, I ran out of space, so I'm putting in a 480, retiring one of the 256s or expanding the ccache size.) (Note, by "remote" I mean "across the room" - the assumption is that laptop and desktop are on the same LAN. I intentionally made my buildbox small in order to make it easy to lug around for car trips. I didn't get it small enough to suitcase in checked baggage, should've gone mini-ITX for that.)

The initial investment (single SSD) for the buildbox was $600-700, and that was around a year and a half ago.

A Dell Precision M2800 that barely matches what the buildbox is capable of (actually, it's significantly less capable CPU-wise due to thermal limits, 2.9 GHz nominal instead of 3.4 GHz nominal, for sustained loads turbo is useless.) costs $1799

Note that the assumption here, based on what the OP has described, is that the system will primarily be used for CPU/RAM-bound tasks, not GPU-bound.