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That's why I buy gaming laptops for my work needs even though I don't play games. Their heatsinks are generously sized resulting in good thermals and acoustics.

I use a similar trick: I try to find a laptop that comes in both discrete-GPU and integrated-GPU configurations, and both version must share the identical chassis.

This way, when I buy the integrated version, I know the chassis has been designed with the heavier airflow of the discrete-GPU version in mind. If I'm lucky, my integrated-GPU config might even use the identical size heat-sinks as the discrete-GPU version.

That's interesting. Any model you can recommend?

Dell XPS 15's and Precisions 55xx's allow this trick.

You can buy them from the manufacturer with no discrete graphics cards.

I have one with a card which is physically turned off for the same trick.

In my experience the XPS 15 7390 with the 6c12t cpu with Windows had the fan running very often. Each time a single cpu thread ran at 100% the fan turned on.

Do you mean the XPS 13? I've never seen an XPS 15 in recent years without an NVIDIA card. The cheapest XPS 15 from 2019 that I can find still comes with the mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, as does my own XPS 15 9560 from 2017.

I'm 2 days late! I'm so sorry!

If you go to dell.com and select one of the more entry level varients you can customise more things:

https://i.imgur.com/deQFdyU.png

Not OP, but from experience I know the Razer Blade Stealth 13 has the same cooling for both integrated GPU and dedicated gpu versions - and it's a very beefy cooling system as is, even with the dedicated gpu the system can stay at full load indefinitely without any issues.

The thinkpad T470/T480 dual-pipe dGPU heatsink is a drop-in replacement for the iGPU version, so if you buy the version without dGPU, you can pretty easily double your heatpipes quite cheap.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9ohpyo/psa_t470t4...

What laptop are you using currently?

That's smart! I'm going to try the trick next time~

Does this trick apply to the 15" MacbookPro (2015)? If so, I guess I'm in luck!

They stopped doing that with the 15" MacBook Pro after 2015 :(

This has been true since the days of desktop computers, too (when laptop wasn't even an option). Gaming specs always make for simply great all-around machines — largely due to component specialization indeed, including thermal outtake.

Note that to this day it's magnitudes of order cheaper to build a desktop for crunching numbers. There's no beating the thermals of that, and thermals = cost either in money or time in this very physically-underpinned market.

I was running video on a Lenovo desktop, CPU was at 100% the whole time, and it didn't heat up or make a lot of fan noise.

but then you end up with a monster of a machine.

Why can't laptop engineers just find a way to break physics, it's not that hard, Einstein did it...

edit: /s

Maybe laptops are not supoosed for heavy lifting...

I do the same thing for my personal laptops. While it certainly has a few quirks, I've found the Razer Blade to be a good balance between size and cooling performance. It is noticeably thicker than a Macbook Pro, but still light enough to carry around.

> If I had to guess they know what they're doing engineering wise, but they're taking a calculated (and poorly thought out, in my opinion) risk that a small percent of people will regularly peg the cpu at 100% usage, and they're further relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down.

If that was the gamble, you'd assume that the laptops would thermal throttle way below the physical Tjunction limit. As a matter of fact, they're still allowing themselves to reach very high temperatures even in common usage, despite an undersized (hence, to some extent, less reliable) cooling solution. That's kinda hard to explain as a sensible choice.

That sounds like the same calculated risk they took with the early 2011 MBPs.

I ran my 2011 MBP hot and it eventually bricked. The logic board "post-recall" also eventually bricked too.

The Apple support thread for that issue ran hundreds of pages, so the 44 page thread for the 16" MBP is just giving me bad flashbacks.

> Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious

This doesn't have to be a bad path. Most peoples' CPU use is intermittent, and there's a decent amount of thermal mass around. I'd rather be able to go fast for 5 seconds and then be throttled to speed X by ability to move heat than to be throttled to speed X all the time.

Tech workers and tech company engineering divisions must be a decent chunk of all MBPs sold. And then there’s the pro video people. Where is that assumption coming from? Compiling, rendering, transcoding are all pretty heavy workloads.

Is Apple ignoring this? Or just assuming these workloads are short/bursty enough to not worry about sustained utilization?

Maybe they're making the assumption that people doing super heavy load stuff like that would more more likely be using a dedicated desktop workstation rather than a laptop.

> relying upon clock rate throttling and the cpu die thermal sensor to keep things from melting down

Seems like that wasn't working fully, since they report having GPU issues after stress testing the computer (external GPU worked fine). And that is worrying. Is the thermal stress shutdown from OS, or onboard the GPU/CPU?

I feel like GPUs don't thermal throttle as gracefully as CPUs do. I have a desktop GPU and when it's at its max temperature for too long, eventually the graphics driver crashes. Meanwhile, CPUs are perfectly happy to run with inadequate cooling; they just thermal throttle.

I worry that it might actually be a software issue. GPU clock starts running slowly, software assumes that it will be running faster, two commands are issued but only one is processed, driver gets confused, driver crashes.

> because the laptop CANNOT be 2mm thicker

Well, they did make the 16" a fair bit thicker than the previous models.