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Comment by strgrd | Hacker News Reader

Looks good on paper, and surprisingly bloat-free stock OS (just the usual Windows 10 crapware), but even with the highest bin kit, my Carbon Gen5 gets hot to the point of being uncomfortable to handle, and starts stuttering with just 5-6 Chrome tabs open. It can play Starcraft 2 for 10-15 minutes (just long enough to run a benchmark!), and then just starts giving up.

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>starts stuttering with just 5-6 Chrome tabs open.

I have a 3rd Gen, and have several dozen tabs open right now, with no issues, stutter or otherwise. One is playing a video, quite a few are also larger page/webapps (e.g. Gmail, Trello, Github in a large PR). I am have the 1440p version, and am plugged into an external monitor that is at 1440p, which should be further taxing the integrated graphics, but it's not showing. I can't imagine you're coming close to hitting any memory limits with just five or six tabs, so presumably something compute related?

What five to six tabs cause stuttering?

I'm guessing you didn't make the mistake of paying more for a much hotter CPU...

What about a different CPU governor to avoid throttling.

Your guess is incorrect. I have the most expensive available from that lineup at the time of purchase. I might be mis-remembering but I recall there being two i7 offerings (plus an i5 version) and I shelled out for the more expensive one.

Unfortunately that seems to be the staple of all modern thin laptops :(

My top spec 15" touchbar MacBook Pro happily locks it's 2.9GHZ CPU to just 1.2GHz after less than two minutes of running anything intensive (including games) and gets too hot to hold in the lap.

There's something wrong with your laptop, the new MBPs shouldn't do that in my experience. I'd recommend visiting a Genius Bar near you!

All of the laptops do that when they reach thermal limit. You can see that behaviour with Intel's power gadget.

(And yes, pattern appears on all MacBooks we have in the company, just at different points. The 2016 locks down the CPU when it reaches about 85 degress C. Even some new iMacs do the same due to inadequate cooling.)

I have the Gen 5 X1 (i7, 16GB RAM, 512 NVMe). I do not notice the type of performance you are experiencing. Although I am running Arch Linux, I can play SC2 on lower-moderate settings. It handles all the work I throw at it thus far.

What proc is that ?

Intel i7-7600U @ 2.8GHz

For the X1 Carbon and Yoga, due to the thin profile, you are better off with an i5 CPU. The i7 will thermal throttle under load, so while you will get better burst performance, the i5 is actually better performance for longer operations.

I just got the X1 Yoga (i5 7300u, 16GB) and so far haven't had any thermal issues with it.

If only there were, you know, reviews from reputable publications that included such information.

The only way to get that type of information is to follow the user forums -- there's a lot of good info on reddit /r/thinkpad. I've been researching for more than a year before I settled on the configuration I picked up.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017...

Performance section: "The comparison of the two Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2017 devices shows that the Intel Core i5-7200U can keep up very well with the Intel Core i7-7500U during continuous load. The reason can be found quickly, since the temperature goal of the Core i7 is already reached after a few seconds, so that the performance has to be throttled considerably. Thus the advantage of the supposedly much faster processor drops to a minimum"

Unfortunately they don't seem to sell an i5 version of the X1 Carbon with 16GB of RAM.

Edit: It appears you can pay more to downgrade to an i5 on the high DPI versions.

The i5 7300u allows for 16GB (from Lenovo's configuration site).

Is there a good app (for windows), to monitor this? I've got an x1c, and never thought about this, and now I'm curious to how often and how much it throttles.

Isn't burst performance more important for nearly anything that is not a server?

The main application where I expect to care about sustained load on such a machine is watching movies, and even then I assume modern systems have good enough hardware acceleration that this isn't much of a load.

I'm same with the i7-7500U on my XPS 13. It's an example of Intel market segmentation where the most expensive isn't really any better, and i'm looking forward to my next Ultralight work laptop being an AMD job - the better graphics will be nice too.

If you're using Linux for work, be careful with AMD - I had no end of trouble with the video drivers. Everytime the kernel updated the screen would only be black with the drivers installed. I had to go through an elaborate process of uninstalling the drivers, booting in safe mode so the video settings wouldn't also black out, run updates, and then make several attempts to get the drivers back in. Happened for both Debian and Red Hat distro variants, and I never found a fix despite a lot of forum research. I'll never try an AMD with Linux again.

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