Cooking an egg on a laptop

S

Snowpea

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 6, 2011
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Is it me or does it seem like every single laptop that can play a decent game can't be used in the fashion of their namesake.... on your lap?

Even my i7 macbook pro feels like it's going to light on fire when i use it for gaming
 
This is what happens when you get a lot of really power hungry microelectronics stuffed into a narrow case with insufficient ventilation.
 
I remember back in the early/mid 2000's they demoed an acer ferrari laptop cooking an egg on the lower carbon fiber casing. Leave gaming to the desktops :)
 
is it just impossible to build a gaming laptop that can run with a remotely normal heat profile?
 
The Asus G73 was the coolest gaming laptop I've ever used, and it was pretty damned quiet as well. If it wasn't about 2.5" thick and have an oversized chassis that could probably have handled a 19 or 20" LCD, that might not have been true. But, so long as manufacturers keep tossing in videocards that use twice the power (or more) of their CPU, you're kind of stuck without going for a huge laptop, or scaling back on the videocard.
 
I've been gaming on the Dell M6600 my work gave me. It has the quadro equivalent of the GTX 460M. Playing Dues EX - HR @ nearly maxed out graphics, (regular shadows and regular SSAO) and the quadro card overclocked a good 50%. Runs super cool and very quiet. Played for about 1.5 hours at a time. Quad core sandy bridge
 
My previous Dell XPS 1645 could cook your whole breakfast at once, idling on the desktop. :rolleyes:
 
Snowpea said:
Is it me or does it seem like every single laptop that can play a decent game can't be used in the fashion of their namesake.... on your lap?

Even my i7 macbook pro feels like it's going to light on fire when i use it for gaming
Click to expand...

Get a DTR. They're really thick but don't heat up as much as a notebook. My officemate got an MSI, from my impression, the thing was built to fit a heatsink, and everything else was for filling the space left over afterwards. :D



BTW, it was LOUD, and i don't mean the speakers.
 
>.< where can i find a fast, gaming capable, slim profile, lightweight laptop? :-D
 
silent-circuit said:
You can't.
Click to expand...

Actually, you might be able to :eek:

Option A: Take a sleeping pill, go to bed, and have a wet dream about it :D

Option B: Build a time machine, go into the future, and bring back something nice.

Option C: Lower some in-game settings, and be content with reduced eye-candy - seriously, concentrate on the fragging/driving/flying and stop ogling the walls, trees, cloth and water already! :rolleyes: (I do not see the point of turning up eye-candy on a piddly 17" or less screen but that's personal opinion and you're welcome to disagree. I game on a 55" plasma TV, which about 10 times the area of a 17", and whilst the resolution is certainly not ideal, the size is great :D I plan to move to either a HMD like the new Sony HMZ-T1, or a 1080p projector once I can afford it. Those new 4k projectors look tasty too, although they are pricey+++.)

Option D: Stick with the current ball-burners, and sacrifice (future) family for gaming. :p

(Other more wacky options)

Build a (semi) portable desktop box (mITX or mATX) and lug it around. Even a mildly overclocked A8-3850 on a mITX board in a M350 case with a low profile cooler will probably outgame many many laptops. The M350 case is probably the volume of a larger 17" laptop, although it does need an external power brick and keyboard/mouse and screen... If you're willing to go marginally larger on the case, plenty mITX cases take half height cards, and you can find half height HD6570s for hybrid crossfire. BTW, this will cost like 500USD or less and fit into most bags that laptops fit into.

Stick an external Thunderbolt based GPU onto a laptop (I think at the moment Thunderbolt is restricted to Apple MacBooks, and a Thunderbolt version of the ViDock is in the works but not released yet AFAIK). Delete OSX and install Win7 on the MacBook if one wishes - If you want to game in a truly mobile fashion, you're still out of luck. (I think one of the VAIOs have a similar setup, using a proprietary Sony connecter which is electrically Thunderbolt/LightPeak - this one might not burn your balls, but it'll definitely burn your pockets.)

Wait for AMD's Trinity next year - no one really knows how Bulldozer cores will perform, but the general expectation is that it should match Nehalem at the minimum. Quad-core Nehalem level of performance should be decent enough not to bottleneck laptop-class graphics anyway, so peak performance matters less here.

As for GPU side of Trinity, again, lots of rumour and conjecture, although AMD have promised +50% FLOPs performance (or 50% power savings - choose one) over Llano. On the desktop side, this should put the stock clock performance of Trinity around HD6670, and one can hope that they release a Black Edition Trinity like they are planning to with Llano (A8-3870BE). Latest rumour has it that the HD7570/7670 will have 768 shaders. Comparing HD6550d to HD6570, both have 400 shaders...

It would be exciting if Trinity had 2 BD modules (4 at-least-Nehalem-level cores) with 768 (probably clocked very low to maintain TDP) VLIW4 or GCN shaders - the more low-clocked hardware, the more likely there will be overclocking headroom, at least on the desktop. It actually makes sense die-size wise as well - Cayman = 389mm2 @ 40nm. Half Cayman @ 32nm = ~125mm2. Each BD module = 31mm2. Throw in a few bits and pieces, Llano die = 228mm2. 768 VLIW4 or GCN shaders are likely to match the 720 or 800 VLIW5 shaders of the HD5750/5770 if clocked/overclocked right :eek: :eek: :eek: (Assuming AMD sort their shit out with memory bandwidth bottlenecks)

(BTW, I think NVIDIA is in big doo-doo if this actually pans out - how many games CANNOT run well/medium @1080p, which is a common resolution in general and particularly for gaming laptops, using a HD5750/5770?? Increasing compute power is all well and fine, if there is software to match.) And there's still the option of LAPTOP hybrid crossfire for even more grunt...

Now, apply this to laptops - (I'm not into laptop gaming, although I'm vaguely aware of it, but one can extrapolate by comparing the A8-3850 to the A8-3850mx). Or by going the 50% reduction in TDP route, imagine A8-3800m level of CPU+GPU performance in a MacBook Air or (ironically) Intel Ultrabook form factor.
 
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i actually have an i7 macbook pro, GT330m. If i put win 7 on this thing, would it be able to game decently? probably not right?
 
One option might be in the near future with the next gen of nVidia and AMD mobile GPUs. If they are anything like the desktop versions they are going to use A LOT less power and be faster. Less power draw-cooler laptop.
 
I use my NP8150 with a 6990m on my lap all the time it doesn't get hot. Perhaps you just got a terrible cooling solution that blows heat out the side and not the back. When buying a "gaming laptop" expect it to be thick, gotta house all those heatsink fins.
 
Snowpea said:
Is it me or does it seem like every single laptop that can play a decent game can't be used in the fashion of their namesake.... on your lap?

Even my i7 macbook pro feels like it's going to light on fire when i use it for gaming
Click to expand...

well, that's like only 60 or maybe 70 Celsius, which is a pretty normal temp for laptop/desktop under load.
 
Snowpea said:
Is it me or does it seem like every single laptop that can play a decent game can't be used in the fashion of their namesake.... on your lap?

Even my i7 macbook pro feels like it's going to light on fire when i use it for gaming
Click to expand...

What do you mean 'even'? All Apples have the poorest cooling on the block.

As others have pointed out, professional workstations are capable of staying fairly frosty when being caned. Gaming laptops - well, I guess it runs the gamut. But I suspect none are approaching 'I'm melting... I'm melting...' like the Crapbooks, even when they self-throttle.
 
Snowpea said:
i actually have an i7 macbook pro, GT330m. If i put win 7 on this thing, would it be able to game decently? probably not right?
Click to expand...

It'll depend, the 512 330m's, while not fantastic, are fast enough to do a decent job, the 256's can do ok as well, but they're hurt by lack of memory.


It'll do pretty well, the i7 330m MBP's are a bit over a year old, so their not as fast as "new hotness", but they're still pretty good. Not "Gaming laptop" good, because that's not what they were designed for, but "pretty good for a laptop that's actually portable".

The thing will still fry an egg under full load though.
 
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