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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

My old clevo laptop has an i7 in it with fans that sound like hair dryers. It never throttles.

I would never buy a laptop where throttling was a presumed solution to thermal issues, because I want to get work done. Pre-m1 macbooks were awful. Even worse than top of the line dell laptops.

I have always felt like a minority for expecting a 2k laptop to actually be able to get work done.

If I would ever be able to run Linux as a first class citizen on an M1 (not going to happen) I would buy one in a flash. I have been playing with my mother in law's MacBook air and the thing is pretty darn amazing.

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If you're looking for a PC that's not a headache to put together, is semi-mobile, powerful and quiet have a look at AMD-based gaming PCs.

I got a Lenovo Legion with 4800H(8/16)/32GB/2T/GTX1650/144Hz a couple of months ago. That's a really sufficiently cooled system. It almost never spins up the fans, it's powerful, has a lot of space, no RGBs and has a super boring, tasteless, anti-theft design that never goes out of style (but the last one is more of a personal preference ;) It's been great.

One eternal problem with gaming laptops and Linux remains the dual-GPU architecture, which is always kind-of-but-not-quite supported. Most often it is easier to forego either the GPU or CPU-video, leaving the overall experience frustrating.

The fact that most (all?) gaming laptops come with NVidia GPUs (requiring closed drivers, unless Nouveau got much better since last time I tried it) doesn't help.

While I understand that this sucks, I've been running Windows as a primary dev machine for a long time now, so this particular problem doesn't affect me personally.

> It never throttles.

Just in case, are you actually monitoring temperatures?

Regardless, buy some proper thermal paste and pads and replace them on everything, it will quiet down significantly while also running cooler.

The difference between factory Thermal Interface Material and custom is often ridiculous.

I do sometimes when I do heavy things on it (long and heavy compiles or when I'm rebuilding some heavy datasets). I never tried with any synthetic benchmarks. The Mac throttles whenever I look at it the wrong way.

Edit: and I don't mind the noise. I will maybe do something if it starts throttling, but I have had 0 issues for as long as I can remember.

FYI, the one M1 MacBook which throttles under heavy load is the MacBook Air, which is actually a 1k laptop ($999).

The MacBook Pro has fans and basically never throttles as I understand from others.

Absolutely untrue. My M1 Air does not skip a beat at all even under sustained load. Barely gets warm.

It’s not untrue. It has been demonstrated in dozens of reviews that the M1 Air throttles under heavy load. Just because it hasn’t done so for your workload, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening for others.

Besides, when it throttles, it’s not a huge slowdown, so most people wouldn’t notice it “skipping a beat” anyway.

An MS Teams video call with 4+ people will get my M1 Air very toasty (because Teams is shit).

However, it's not as hot as my old 16" MBP got (which would get too hot to have on your lap), it doesn't noticeably get slower, and it's of course totally silent.

I know. I have an M1 and and it hardly ever throttles. I was making a point to the OP though

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