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You could keep temperature down with fans, but my 90W thinkpad has fans so strong it sounds (and feels) like a hair drier and still runs very hot. I'm having a

You could keep temperature down with fans, but my 90W thinkpad has fans so strong it sounds (and feels) like a hair drier and still runs very hot. I'm having a hard time imagining a 180W laptop that isn't hotter than hell.

steelbrain 3y ago
You’re missing another variable here. In your case it may just be the thermal interface material (TIM) isn’t doing a good job of transferring the heat from the processor onto the heat sinks that the fan blows over. I’ve had temperature drops of over 15 degrees c by opting for Liquid Metal, everything else being same.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  Additionally, loudness is not necessarily correlated with actually moving air. It can often correlate with obstruction to moving air.
vorpalhex 3y ago
You have a gap in your understanding of the physics here. Even a 400W laptop can be cool to the touch. A laptop is hot to the touch because it has hot components (eg a processor running at full throttle) and fails to dissipate that heat correctly. That is mostly divorced from it's power consumption. If you ran a large robotic arm off your laptop, you'd be using a lot of watts but making only a bit of heat.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  There's no gap in understanding, the only way a 400W laptop can be cool to the touch is if it rapidly dissipates all that thermal energy. That would require one hell of a fan, which is what I said with my hairdrier remark. Even 90W already requires a very noisy fan. A fan moving enough air to keep a 400W laptop cool to the touch isn't realistic to put into the form factor of a laptop, and a fan sufficient to keep even a 180W laptop cool seems extremely dubious to me. It would sound like a vacuum cleaner. What I was missing is the part where the laptop doesn't consume 180W and a substantial fraction of that power is just passing through the laptop to peripherals.
- cogman10 3y ago
  Case in point, I’ve driven my desktop computer up to 600 watts and mostly it just puts out a warm stream of air silently.

steelbrain 3y ago

You’re missing another variable here. In your case it may just be the thermal interface material (TIM) isn’t doing a good job of transferring the heat from the processor onto the heat sinks that the fan blows over. I’ve had temperature drops of over 15 degrees c by opting for Liquid Metal, everything else being same.

111111IIIIIII 3y ago
Additionally, loudness is not necessarily correlated with actually moving air. It can often correlate with obstruction to moving air.

vorpalhex 3y ago

You have a gap in your understanding of the physics here. Even a 400W laptop can be cool to the touch. A laptop is hot to the touch because it has hot components (eg a processor running at full throttle) and fails to dissipate that heat correctly. That is mostly divorced from it's power consumption. If you ran a large robotic arm off your laptop, you'd be using a lot of watts but making only a bit of heat.

mcpackieh 3y ago
There's no gap in understanding, the only way a 400W laptop can be cool to the touch is if it rapidly dissipates all that thermal energy. That would require one hell of a fan, which is what I said with my hairdrier remark. Even 90W already requires a very noisy fan. A fan moving enough air to keep a 400W laptop cool to the touch isn't realistic to put into the form factor of a laptop, and a fan sufficient to keep even a 180W laptop cool seems extremely dubious to me. It would sound like a vacuum cleaner. What I was missing is the part where the laptop doesn't consume 180W and a substantial fraction of that power is just passing through the laptop to peripherals.
cogman10 3y ago
Case in point, I’ve driven my desktop computer up to 600 watts and mostly it just puts out a warm stream of air silently.