On 1/26/2007 10:10 AM, rbw wrote:
Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
In another practical related question I have been mulling over...
If the laptop/notebook is a desktop replacement and you anticipate being
wall powered almost all the time and there is a significant price
differential on this basis of this new processor offering, do you just
take the higher power consumption and the lower price...
Be careful about processor temperature with continuous use at high
processor load. Laptops throttle back the processor if it gets too hot.
This compromise allows them to make the thing smaller, quieter, lighter,
etc., but might not be the compromise you want. The lower-power
processor might help this.
One clue that the thermal design is wimpy is how long does it take after
a cold power up until the fan starts. I had one laptop that would run
all day and the fan rarely came on. Another one I had the fan would run
almost all the time it was turned on.
Another clue might be the max temp rating, but specsmanship reduces the
value of that to near nil. I don't know how you find all this out before
you buy, but booting to knoppix and running some tests over a period of
time might help.
I've run the following in Knoppix as a heat test:
perl -e 'while (1) {print $a,"\n" if !(++$a % 1000000);}'
If it's a dual core processor run two at the same time. I'm not sure if
knoppix has lm-sensors and if it will give meaningful results on the
laptop in question, but it's worth a try.
I've heard that some laptops also throttle RAM speed based on temperature.
Karl Cunningham
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