Do modern laptops really run this hot?

[sunflakes]

Please suggest me a good and reliable cooling pad.

[Haoie]

My 4 year old Toshiba Satellite's overheating right now!

I think the fan broke, so after x amount of time it shuts down by itself. Still working mostly OK though.

Damn overheating.

[aaron]

i feel my macbook making me more and more sterile every time i put it on my lap. which is, incidentally, cheaper than a vasectomy and kind of awesome.

[pakopako]

I thought portables were supposed to run cooler and made to produce less heat? (whereas it seems that nowadays they just make them more resistant to heat?) Even the flimsy dual core atom netbooks produce only slightly lower temps, at least in tropical countries like mine.

Nowadays, portables are made for performance or portability while being affordable.heat contro is near the bottom of the list. a few friends I know are hyped about UNDER clocking (throttling down) to achieve lower temps.

The new (2006+) DELL & HP models I see are NOT cool. They just were not built for that, low high or ultra portable models. My1998 Satellite with internalized AC adapter did a better job of heat dissipation -- it had more empty space inside, the processor was by the exhaust fan and right under the PCMCIA slot (which I could slot in a secondary fan).

I still like my circa-2000 single core processor. It runs about as well as a slate and just as cool with out all the apps to throttle (down) the speed.

Please suggest me a good and reliable cooling pad.

Anything with an aluminum (or metallic) layer is preferred, but more expensive.

I use a combination of plastic Targus products to some effectiveness -- they have a plastic USB-powered built-in-fan cooling pad that draws a good amount of air in. Lie that atop their folding plastic laptop trey (they call it a "lapdesk") to tilt the pad so it sucks more air and my laptop runs 15-C cooler. It's an extra pound of plastic and makes bulky laptops extra bulkier, but it's very cool.

Using the tray alone is not bad, but the rubber grip-pads smell bad when the laptop warms up. Using the cooling pad alone means it has to be on a flat surface to draw air from instead of my lap. Using a padded desk like in this link alone is silly - -the padding just feels nice to rest on your lap, but it adds weight and the flat surface won't cool the laptop at all.

My laptop operates around 25~45°C with the set-up, 35-60°C without it.
Keep in mind I run a single-core 1.5 GHz, often keeping it throttled down to 600 MHz (to double battery life) and using software to keep my (rather loud) internal exhaust fan on all the time. (I really do want to hotwire the nearly-silent GPU fan, which has its own off-motherboard sensor, to be on all the time as well.)

[AznKhmerBoi]

This was happening to my laptop recently and after some research on this issue, ive found the problem to be with the heatsink. I just went on ebay and got a new heatsink and reaaply w/ better thermal grease and now runs about 30c lower.

My 4 year old Toshiba Satellite's overheating right now!

I think the fan broke, so after x amount of time it shuts down by itself. Still working mostly OK though.

Damn overheating.

[neilencio]

Any info on the pros and cons of undervolting? I'm about to try underclocking and undervolting my brazo to get cooler temps, but info provided by google (especially yahoo answer threads) is all over the place. Here are the (mostly conflicting) info I gathered, feel free to debunk or explain them (as I generally trust the advice of techies from racketboy over the more mainstream tech forums):

1. underclocking without undervolting will harm the cpu in the long run (due to excess voltage)
2. undervolting will not harm your cpu, and in fact, will lower temps and extend cpu and battery life (provided that you found the sweet spot through stress testing)
3. undervolting will damage your cpu

I actually was able to achieve favorable results (-5C - 7C, all the programs and games I use run well)by just underclocking (as I didn't want to mess with the VIDs), but point number 1 made me stop.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Unless you're pushing the upper limits of your CPU temp wise, I don't think it will make it last longer. Besides, I doubt you'll have that same laptop 10 years down the road.

[neilencio]

I use VM for work, and it always maxes out one core. my average temps during use is on the high 60s-low 70s. I think that's a bit stressful for the cpu, considering I work 8-12 hrs a day nonstop.

I also need to use the VM so I can easily move entire systems by just transferring the virtual disks. and it also allows me to isolate everything so that I don't have to worry about viruses taking down everything (and bosses who snoop using teamviewer. I can do my work on the VM and do browsing/gaming outside of the vm instance).

[pakopako]

Any info on the pros and cons of undervolting?

Under-clocking is never bad. Especially software under-clocking.

I won't make claims it will lengthen the life of your computer -- I really don't know -- I do know that because you're restricting your computer from pushing itself harder, you extend your battery life and reduce heat output. (See my previous post about "throttling down".)

You will, of course, take a hit in productivity -- flash games or movies that would normally require your machine to run at-or-near full-speed will stutter if you shunt your system down to half-speed. (Of course programs that only require half of your processing power won't notice a thing.)

Under-volting... I've done this with mixed results. If you're careful about it, I can't foresee much trouble out of it. Pushing the safety limits of your machine in the opposite direction (seeing how slow you can go before your machine falls asleep instead of revving your machine into a puddle of slag) doesn't seem too dangerous. The biggest word of caution is that you stress test it -- because if you under-volt and your machine suddenly wants to perform really fast and can't draw enough power to do so, it will shut down without warning.

As I said, I under-volted a few of my systems. The one I wanted to get the most out of was the one that didn't take to it very well, but the others had minor improvements to battery life. Maybe an extra 10-15%, or roughly 20 minutes, of battery life and maybe 3~5°C overall.

Under-volting AND under-clocking... what's the big deal again? So you're running at half-speed (under-clocked) and you're safely within your under-volting parameters for that speed. You're not pushing the envelope or anything are you?

Let me show you the numbers for my 1.5 GHz single-core Intel machine:
The lowest speed it can go is 400 Mhz. The voltage range is 0.7 (lowest) ~ 1.0V (normal).
I throttle it down to 600 MHz @ 0.85 V. The current moving through the core is well within the safety range and if I try to run, say bSNES, I'll just see it chug along at a horrible framerate like it was running on an actual 600 Mhz machine.

My worst-case example is a dual-core AMD early portable-Athlon model (a DELL, yay). Underclocking was limited and under-volting was annoying. The threshold was smaller (0.8~1.0V) so I wasn't saving much that way, but also the transition for that chipset model was experimental. So if I wanted smarter "automatic gear switching" (so that the processor jumps from 50% to 75% to 100% smoothly), it wouldn't work. I either to omit 75% making the core jump from 50% to 100%, manually tell it to go 75%, or watch the machine hang itself trying to shift from 50% to 75%.

Unless you're pushing the upper limits of your CPU temp wise, I don't think it will make it last longer. Besides, I doubt you'll have that same laptop 10 years down the road.

I was talking with wootcube about that a few months ago. He has a good system of not being tied down to a single machine for too long, which is great.

I, however, drag the hell out of whatever I get my hands on. Maybe it's the "car" mentality (that each time you turn the ignition, the price keeps cutting itself in half), but I've been able to tweak and refine and tune-up decade-plus machines. I wouldn't recommend this if you can help yourself, but it is possible.

I use VM for work, and it always maxes out one core. my average temps during use is on the high 60s-low 70s. I think that's a bit stressful for the cpu, considering I work 8-12 hrs a day nonstop.

Missed this part.
Because you're running the VM 8-12 hours, you're not really going to "extend the life" of your machine -- as a work-machine it is going to RROD faster than most people's personal machines, you just want it to not die as quickly.

As for consuming the entire core, have you tried under-clocking/speed throttling (down) the system? It will still using 100% of the core, but if you don't take a hit in productivity, then that's just inefficient coding on the part of the VM (to max out the processor without delivering additional performance).

[KDub]

I suggest this cooling pad
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834997872