Gaming Laptop CPUS Run Hot - But how how hot is too hot?

[Brandi93]

I had a variety of gaming laptops and all got into 90s territory while gaming for 30 or more minutes. 

Laptop CPUs are designed to run hot, but when a laptop turbo boosts at maximum clock speed and reaches 100 degrees Celsius, even for a second, I tend to freak out.

 

Last year I had an MSI GF63 Thin, i5-10300H + 1650 Max-Q. 

Temperature reached 101 degrees once so I had to limit turbo boost to 3.7Ghz. It helped a lot and max temperature didn't exceed 92 degrees most of the time, which in my opinion is much safer. 

 

As I understand it, modern CPUS tend to trigger thermal protection shutdown at 105 degrees right?  

[Shimejii]

Most laptops like that are designed to last 3 years, then fail usually, once warranty ends or a bit after that. Heat death is by far one of the most common issues for laptops, besides liquid damage, drops, and animals.

[Brandi93]

9 hours ago, Shimejii said:

Most laptops like that are designed to last 3 years, then fail usually, once warranty ends or a bit after that. Heat death is by far one of the most common issues for laptops, besides liquid damage, drops, and animals.

Yeah most are. There are some exceptions though, like my GTX 1070M laptop from 2017. I cleaned it once back during COVID, opened it up and brushed most of the dust out and it's alive even after 6 years. But most people aren't comfortable opening up a laptop like that.

[8tg]

It’s pretty amazing to see business equivalent hardware and how it handles thermals and acoustics because the device is expected to last more than a few years.

Compare a gaming laptop, with its intel core processor and nvidia rtx gpu, to a mobile workstation with a Xeon and Quadro.

Even of the same performance tier, the workstation will have better thermals and acoustics by a LOT, like an absolutely massive difference. You’d be hard pressed to see a mobile Xeon top 70c. 
 

The gaming laptop industry needs to stop making disposable products and sacrifice some aesthetics for performance sometimes. They can make a cool and quiet gaming laptop by just making it a little thicker and a little more expensive, with a bigger and more capable Heatsink setup.

Not super huge, not much more expensive, it would take very little. But that market for gaming laptops has become super competitive, and to make the best priced machine for a certain set of hardware, it’s become a race to the bottom in overall quality cutting as many costs as possible.

[Qyygle]

6 minutes ago, 8tg said:

It’s pretty amazing to see business equivalent hardware and how it handles thermals and acoustics because the device is expected to last more than a few years.

Compare a gaming laptop, with its intel core processor and nvidia rtx gpu, to a mobile workstation with a Xeon and Quadro.

Even of the same performance tier, the workstation will have better thermals and acoustics by a LOT, like an absolutely massive difference. You’d be hard pressed to see a mobile Xeon top 70c. 
 

The gaming laptop industry needs to stop making disposable products and sacrifice some aesthetics for performance sometimes. They can make a cool and quiet gaming laptop by just making it a little thicker and a little more expensive, with a bigger and more capable Heatsink setup.

Not super huge, not much more expensive, it would take very little. But that market for gaming laptops has become super competitive, and to make the best priced machine for a certain set of hardware, it’s become a race to the bottom in overall quality cutting as many costs as possible.

I agree with you on making the things thicker for the sake of cooling and efficiency, but you’re kidding yourself if you think business class workstations are any better at cooling or performance.

Xeons aren’t magically better chips than their normal i-series counterparts, they’re mainly just getting ecc support and vpro. HP, Lenovo, and Dell workstations thermal throttle just as hard as normal gaming machines if pushed hard, the only difference is the professional lines may choose to cap CPU/GPU power draw at lower limits than the gaming lines for the sake of office ergonomics.

The reason the Xeon ‘only’ hits 70c is usually because it capped itself to base clock speed after 10 seconds of PL1 and is now drawing 30-40W instead of over 100W like the gaming equivalent.