TLDR: CPU frequency on newer notebooks always at 1.6+GHz; fans are always on and loud; Is it a CPU problem?
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far! After looking for alternatives we’ve been eyeing the Razer Blade 14, Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus M16. If anyone has some experience with one of those devices, please let us know. Thank you!
Hello everyone!
Me and an acquaintance have recently bought new notebooks, one with an i9 13900H and one with an i7 12700H. We were both pretty unhappy with how loud the fans were even when basically doing nothing (had one tab in Firefox and the taskmanager open - using Windows 11). We found out, that the idle frequency of the CPUs on both devices was constantly quite high (min. 1.6GHz, most of the time even more, even though hwinfo tests showed that they should go down to ~0.8GHz). Our old notebooks (i7 8750, i7 7700) and a newer Thinkpad (i5 12500) don’t have this issue - the frequency drops to 0.8GHz and the fans turn off and stay silent. It’s possible to browse, code and do everything else that does not create much load on the CPU without the fans spinning up at all.
On all devices we used various tweaks (turning turbo boost off etc.), but it shows no effect on newer models.
So now we’re wondering if this is normal for newer notebooks (after 2018) or if there was something off with those notebooks in particular. Could AMD CPUs be better in that aspect?
We’ve both already returned those notebooks and can’t do further testing (tho even with the manufacturer support we found no solution).
If anyone has some more experience with that topic and maybe some insight on what we should look out for on new notebooks, any info is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.
That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.
If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.
Hi, I’m the second person mentioned in the post.
Yeah, ARM CPUs are a completely different beast, I hope that it will find some ground in the Linux/Windows space too (or maybe Risc-V). Not much hope for games though, at least not in the near future.
I’m eyeing the Razer Blade 14, which has pretty much the same hardware as your G14, so may I ask some questions? More than half of the time I’m using the Notebook, I’m programming and I’m quite sensitive when it comes to noise, so the question: do the fans of your G14 ever turn off in idle and low workloads? My current Blade 15 2018 does so and I don’t think I can compromise on that behavior but it’s slowly starting to struggle with games. (I’m generally more willing to compromise on top-end performance than noise on low workloads)
No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.
I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.
Ok thanks. That doesn’t sound that good.
An M1 is not really an option for me, due to several reasons, work related and ideologically, I really like to have control over my system, I’m only using Windows for gaming until Linux solutions are good enough - they may be already with Proton but I have to find some time to give them a try. There don’t seem to be that much other options in the mobile gaming market. I may try the Blade 14 (or maybe even the G14, we’ll see) it but if it doesn’t work the way I want, I’m probably not upgrading from my old Blade 15 for now (in Linux I got it down to about 5-10W while coding with medium brightness, in Windows I got it to be silent, no clue about energy usage itself). Maybe there will be some breakthroughs in the next years.
I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.
I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.
And that is exactly why I bought an M2 Air this year, price vs performance nothing beats the MacBooks at the moment.
FWIW, Proton has handled everything I’ve tried in my Steam library except Cities: Skylines. I spent eight hours just yesterday playing Factorio at 4K on KDE.
That said, I don’t play GPU-melting games in favour of $20-$30 indie games, so YMMV. I wasn’t even aware of Proton when Windows finally gave me one too many OneDrive entreaties, and I was pleasantly surprised by the state of affairs on Linux.