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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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