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I got an equivalent Haswell processor on my 13inch and have never ever experienced CPU throttling even while gaming. It's very very rare for non-ultrabooks to

I got an equivalent Haswell processor on my 13inch and have never ever experienced CPU throttling even while gaming. It's very very rare for non-ultrabooks to throttle and usually when it happens is because some manufacturers intend it for whatever marketing reasons and not due to heat really building up. You likely wouldn't benefit from a 7700 in a laptop in real life tasks but to suggest that all new laptops with high end processors throttle enough that your old one ends up performing better is an outlandish exaggeration. Not to mention that the GHz race has been over for some time now and clockspeed isn't all that matters.

owenversteeg 9y ago
Post-Ivy Bridge mobile Intel processors can't maintain the same maximum all-core clock speed as their predecessors. If you're looking for proof, take a look at Intel's marketing materials for the processors: they start marketing the Turbo Boost clock speed as the "Turbo Boost (single core)". That's because the processor won't let you Turbo Boost the entire processor to the maximum clock speed, only one core. For even more proof, to dissipate power you need a lot of copper and some giant fans. The X230T has a substantial amount of its very thick (1.2") body dedicated to heat pipes, fans, and copper fins. A handful of things I work with are very closely related to heat (Peltier elements, batteries, and motors) so I often look at things with a thermal camera to see how heat is dissipated throughout the laptop. In the X230T I was very impressed: Lenovo's engineers did a fantastic job. The laptop is capable of a substantial amount of heat dissipation. Meanwhile in my previous, fancy, new Yoga Pro laptop with the fanciest processor you can put in it, the thermal management is crap. There's a tiny little fan maybe 5mm thick that sits in a strange place and doesn't seem too effective at anything except making noise. The same goes for every other recent laptop I've seen: most of them seem deadly afraid of making the laptop too heavy or too thick, so they sacrifice heat management. For the equivalent Haswell processor, maximum TDP is 55 watts vs approximately 40 watts for mine. So your laptop, which is almost undoubtedly thinner and with worse thermal management, has to dissipate almost 50% more heat. And don't go thinking there might be some revolution in heat management that lets yours dissipate more heat in a similar space, because "copper plus fans" has been the formula for the past 30 years. (With the exception of water cooling and peltier elements, which are most certainly not in your laptop.) Furthermore, if your processor is putting out 55 watts of heat, _more than_ 55 watts have to go in somewhere. So that's also draining your battery. Standard batteries are around 45ish watt hours in recent laptops, so assuming the rest of your laptop (screen, RAM, motherboard, Wifi, hard drive, etc etc) literally drains zero power you'd have less than 45 minutes of battery power at maximum load. Does that sound like something that would freak out a consumer? Yep. So even if the laptop was thermally capable, this maximum power mode is always limited so the consumer doesn't freak out about getting a battery life measured in minutes. Meanwhile, my Thinkpad, which has a 55 watt hour battery, lasts about an hour and change at maximum power. Did this freak out some people? Maybe. But 2012 Lenovo said "yep, we want to give our consumers maximum power, and if they drain their battery that's their problem." Personally I love it. If I want to limit performance I can just put it in energy saving mode. But most of the time I keep it at maximum, because I like it and in a world with good RAM and a nice SSD the CPU starts to become a bottleneck reasonably often.

owenversteeg 9y ago

Post-Ivy Bridge mobile Intel processors can't maintain the same maximum all-core clock speed as their predecessors. If you're looking for proof, take a look at Intel's marketing materials for the processors: they start marketing the Turbo Boost clock speed as the "Turbo Boost (single core)". That's because the processor won't let you Turbo Boost the entire processor to the maximum clock speed, only one core. For even more proof, to dissipate power you need a lot of copper and some giant fans. The X230T has a substantial amount of its very thick (1.2") body dedicated to heat pipes, fans, and copper fins. A handful of things I work with are very closely related to heat (Peltier elements, batteries, and motors) so I often look at things with a thermal camera to see how heat is dissipated throughout the laptop. In the X230T I was very impressed: Lenovo's engineers did a fantastic job. The laptop is capable of a substantial amount of heat dissipation. Meanwhile in my previous, fancy, new Yoga Pro laptop with the fanciest processor you can put in it, the thermal management is crap. There's a tiny little fan maybe 5mm thick that sits in a strange place and doesn't seem too effective at anything except making noise. The same goes for every other recent laptop I've seen: most of them seem deadly afraid of making the laptop too heavy or too thick, so they sacrifice heat management. For the equivalent Haswell processor, maximum TDP is 55 watts vs approximately 40 watts for mine. So your laptop, which is almost undoubtedly thinner and with worse thermal management, has to dissipate almost 50% more heat. And don't go thinking there might be some revolution in heat management that lets yours dissipate more heat in a similar space, because "copper plus fans" has been the formula for the past 30 years. (With the exception of water cooling and peltier elements, which are most certainly not in your laptop.) Furthermore, if your processor is putting out 55 watts of heat, _more than_ 55 watts have to go in somewhere. So that's also draining your battery. Standard batteries are around 45ish watt hours in recent laptops, so assuming the rest of your laptop (screen, RAM, motherboard, Wifi, hard drive, etc etc) literally drains zero power you'd have less than 45 minutes of battery power at maximum load. Does that sound like something that would freak out a consumer? Yep. So even if the laptop was thermally capable, this maximum power mode is always limited so the consumer doesn't freak out about getting a battery life measured in minutes. Meanwhile, my Thinkpad, which has a 55 watt hour battery, lasts about an hour and change at maximum power. Did this freak out some people? Maybe. But 2012 Lenovo said "yep, we want to give our consumers maximum power, and if they drain their battery that's their problem." Personally I love it. If I want to limit performance I can just put it in energy saving mode. But most of the time I keep it at maximum, because I like it and in a world with good RAM and a nice SSD the CPU starts to become a bottleneck reasonably often.