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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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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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 )
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.
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.
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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.
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.
FYI, TFS mentioned that they've found Clevo, which is the manufacturer for Sager. And that's about as good as they're going to do without going over four grand. I'm running an NP2740, which is an ideal laptop for me that doesn't have an RTG instead of a battery. As a "desktop replacement" the battery life does suck - full-tilt Linux DE sucks it dry in a little over two hours, but I'm not waiting for a slow laptop, so it's a trade-off worth my time. I'd love 10 hours on it, but that's not the world I have available to live in.
FWIW, sensors says mine has run at max 84C since I've had it on (the most I recall is 90% sustained of all cores). If I need to really push the CPU's to full capacity (i.e. ffmpeg), I usually access the data via ssh on a desktop i7 and run the job there. Good network storage makes that easy on a LAN. For field work, I'm happy to plug in and have a mobile i7 under the keyboard.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.