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> I had just as many issues with the Dell XPS, where even basic video games would become unplayable after 15 minutes due to CPU throttling down to 0.8 Ghz. Ser

> I had just as many issues with the Dell XPS, where even basic video games would become unplayable after 15 minutes due to CPU throttling down to 0.8 Ghz. Serious Q: Have laptops ever been decent for gaming? I don't game much, but I think the form factor would seriously crush thermal capacity. I have a 15" MBP and it's fine for most dev work save Node and Typescript occasionally cause the fans to spin up for extended periods of time. Getting rid of VSCode in favor of more memory/ CPU friendly editors helped a bunch. Does your work involve a lot of 3D or graphics?

bserge 6y ago
They are good for gaming when manufacturers use a good cooling system. Which is, almost never. HP, Dell/Alienware, Lenovo, all of them have had overheating CPUs for over a decade. GPUs are fine half the time, surprisingly. Their testing is garbage, what they call normal use seems to be completely different from what power users call normal use. And I'm talking about "workstations", not cheap consumer laptops. Oh, but the design constraints, you'll say. OK, that's forgivable for Ultrabooks/thin-and-light laptops. Not workstations. And before the thinness fad, they were still overheating. And not because of design constraints. As an example, I'll bring the Elitebook 8760/8770w/ZBook 17 G1/Zbook 17 G2 series, all of which have the same internal design and layout. All were overheating after a while, due to thermal paste going bad (and being shit from the factory, but I digress). With the ZBook G2 it got very, very bad. Those Haswell chips with FIVR were mini nuclear reactors. HP realized they weren't "just overheating", but "extremely overheating". Their solution? The same heatsink with an extra heatpipe. Just like that, poof, problem solved. One extra heatpipe! That can't cost more than $2 in the factory. I don't know any buyer who wouldn't have paid an extra $5-10 to have a proper working $4000 workstation. Whoever is saving money on copper and screws in these companies needs to be fired and banned from ever working in companies making hardware. I'm not even going to talk about Apple, everyone knows their stuff has a ton of problems. But they're selling people on design and software, not quality engineering. And they actually solved the heat problems by going in the opposite direction with the M1 (ultra low power usage while maintaining performance instead of a good cooling system).
- real-dino 6y ago
  It's a better solution IMHO. A cooling system does nothing to increase battery life. Otherwise you have a creeping race that leads you ever closer to 'fake-desktop' laptops. I do watch Louis Rossmann about Macs, and how terribly they are designed, but this is universal across many devices. I had so many issues getting low latency audio to work on my 2 year old XPS, I just plain replaced it with a 5 year old mac and had better performance and stability out of the box. No company is perfect, but Apple does get consistently close. I'm glad they don't focus on the specs and focus on experience. Who really needs a 4k screen on a laptop?
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > They are good for gaming when manufacturers use a good cooling system. Which is, almost never. Ok, this is more or less what I thought. This does seem solvable, but also seems like the sort of thing the bean counters would cut early. From what I recall, pre-Dell Alienware did a decent job at it.
real-dino 6y ago
Nah, I just wanted to play some basic 2D games like Cogmind, Factorio, Slay the Spire and Pyre whilst abroad. It was one of the main selling points of the XPS, that it was an ultra-light that you could play a few games on. I certainly didn't fancy a gaming laptop that's all compromises and no upsides just to play mindless AAA titles. But the problem with the XPS is they jammed as much processing power as they could. It's great in theory having a Nvidea card as well as an i7, but it just can't handle both running at above half capacity.

bserge 6y ago

They are good for gaming when manufacturers use a good cooling system. Which is, almost never. HP, Dell/Alienware, Lenovo, all of them have had overheating CPUs for over a decade. GPUs are fine half the time, surprisingly. Their testing is garbage, what they call normal use seems to be completely different from what power users call normal use. And I'm talking about "workstations", not cheap consumer laptops. Oh, but the design constraints, you'll say. OK, that's forgivable for Ultrabooks/thin-and-light laptops. Not workstations. And before the thinness fad, they were still overheating. And not because of design constraints. As an example, I'll bring the Elitebook 8760/8770w/ZBook 17 G1/Zbook 17 G2 series, all of which have the same internal design and layout. All were overheating after a while, due to thermal paste going bad (and being shit from the factory, but I digress). With the ZBook G2 it got very, very bad. Those Haswell chips with FIVR were mini nuclear reactors. HP realized they weren't "just overheating", but "extremely overheating". Their solution? The same heatsink with an extra heatpipe. Just like that, poof, problem solved. One extra heatpipe! That can't cost more than $2 in the factory. I don't know any buyer who wouldn't have paid an extra $5-10 to have a proper working $4000 workstation. Whoever is saving money on copper and screws in these companies needs to be fired and banned from ever working in companies making hardware. I'm not even going to talk about Apple, everyone knows their stuff has a ton of problems. But they're selling people on design and software, not quality engineering. And they actually solved the heat problems by going in the opposite direction with the M1 (ultra low power usage while maintaining performance instead of a good cooling system).

real-dino 6y ago
It's a better solution IMHO. A cooling system does nothing to increase battery life. Otherwise you have a creeping race that leads you ever closer to 'fake-desktop' laptops. I do watch Louis Rossmann about Macs, and how terribly they are designed, but this is universal across many devices. I had so many issues getting low latency audio to work on my 2 year old XPS, I just plain replaced it with a 5 year old mac and had better performance and stability out of the box. No company is perfect, but Apple does get consistently close. I'm glad they don't focus on the specs and focus on experience. Who really needs a 4k screen on a laptop?
ogre_codes 6y ago
> They are good for gaming when manufacturers use a good cooling system. Which is, almost never. Ok, this is more or less what I thought. This does seem solvable, but also seems like the sort of thing the bean counters would cut early. From what I recall, pre-Dell Alienware did a decent job at it.

real-dino 6y ago

Nah, I just wanted to play some basic 2D games like Cogmind, Factorio, Slay the Spire and Pyre whilst abroad. It was one of the main selling points of the XPS, that it was an ultra-light that you could play a few games on. I certainly didn't fancy a gaming laptop that's all compromises and no upsides just to play mindless AAA titles. But the problem with the XPS is they jammed as much processing power as they could. It's great in theory having a Nvidea card as well as an i7, but it just can't handle both running at above half capacity.