Ask HN: Why aren't laptops evaluated with a plot of performance vs. fan noise?
Nobody wants to use a laptop that has high performance but also fan noise for extended periods of time.
It also performs display colorimetry and calibration, display PWM tests, Wi-Fi and SD card slot (if present) speed tests, basic teardowns, extended performance tests (accounting for PL1/PL2 limits), combined CPU + GPU performance tests on a veritable battery of benchmarks from games and renderers to industrial benchmark suites on a variety of resolutions and settings.
I skimmed several reviews on that site in the past but never saw that. Reason is they were their equally great mobile phone reviews, which i read to check for blueish tint of displays.
For GPU noise comparison, techpowerup.com does it best. Pick the latest test of the model you are interested in -> Go to the Noise emissions page -> Directly compare against all other boards with that chip they measured.
Effectively the parent is saying 'fan noise is up there with performance as my most important metric in a laptop'.
This may be true for the OP, but it's by no means a universal consideration. Personally, battery life comes before fan noise for me as a metric. YMMV.
Quiet operation is a luxury anyway. You don't buy a laptop to be quiet, you buy a laptop to perform the workloads you need (for which you need performance). People who are budget constrained usually want the best possible performance for the price.
If I can't get a quiet one, I don't buy that laptop.
If no laptop performs the workload I want without noise, then I use a quiet desktop, or remotely connect to the loud machine in another location.
Error
I do care about fan noise because I am always listening to music.
How much "fan noise"? Compared to what? An anechoic sensory deprivation chamber? A jack hammer outside the office building? Your refrigerator? Car tires at highway speed?
It doesn't need to be "compared" to anything. Just a chart of noise in dB vs. performance would suffice.
That way you can glance at the chart and say "at this performance level, I can expect it to make this much noise"
It's pretty "quiet" in other contexts
I took a whole semester class in college on the physics of sound - decibels and loudness are just bleeding weird :)
Much like speed, we have standardized units and measurement methods for sound.
See my example: "highway speed"
Standardize a laptop setup and environment, pick a listening position, measure dbSPL. A good position might be “1m from the center of the laptop base, at an elevation of 45°, while the laptop is on a flat, hard desk”. You know, more or less how people use laptops. Obviously you can go loose or specific with the description of the listening setup. You could standardize the room, you could standardize the desk, etc. I think the desk probably should be there, since it will reflect fan noise, and closer match actual laptop usage.
You measure the A-weighted fan noise under different loads and publish something like dB SPL versus W graph.
But consider that a lot of people live in environments so loud that for a lot of laptops the max fan noise is at best a mild nuisance, at least with modern laptops.
Also a lot of laptop gaming is done with headphones.
Then there is the problem that measuring fan noise is harder to do then measuring performance, for the first you just have to run benchmarks in a "normal" temperate room, for the later you need a consistent not too loud noise environment.
- Room temperature: It makes a difference whether it is summer or winter.
- Throttling ratio : A lot of laptops will lower the CPU speed rather than keep the fan running for a prolonged time, or am I wrong ?
I bought a powerful CPU not because I wanted to calculate pi continuously all day long, but so when I did do something demanding it was able to do that in a reasonable time.
99% of the time my CPU is running <10% usage. Same with most people I'd think.
i bought a used laptop "lenovo ideapad" ryzen 3 something.
Am running kde neon. The only problem, the FANS ARE 100% ALL THE TIME.
it gets tiring pretty fast because the jet blower of the fan is supposed to come up during heavy load but not all the time.
i tried pwmconfig but it couldn't find fans. Same for other utilities. They just don't recognize the fans.
Could it be a hardware issue or a software one beacause the fans are working fine, they just don't modulate.