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Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#51

Post by moonbug »

capableweb wrote: post #25
arketyp wrote: post #11

The Huawei Matebook X looks good to me. I was really disappointed with the fan behavior of my Thinkpad X1 Nano -- constantly spinning, and loudly. I use third-party software to control it now. Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous.

> Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous What program are you using for writing said emails? That matters more than what user action you're performing. As a reference, using gmail in firefox makes my X1 very loud too, but I've moved to Thunderbird as of late and it's much more careful about resource usage.

ah "you are using it wrong", that famously helpful reply.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#52

Post by arketyp »

capableweb wrote: post #25
arketyp wrote: post #11

The Huawei Matebook X looks good to me. I was really disappointed with the fan behavior of my Thinkpad X1 Nano -- constantly spinning, and loudly. I use third-party software to control it now. Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous.

> Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous What program are you using for writing said emails? That matters more than what user action you're performing. As a reference, using gmail in firefox makes my X1 very loud too, but I've moved to Thunderbird as of late and it's much more careful about resource usage.

I figure, basically, that I should be able to do whatever things I do on my phone without the fan spinning.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#53

Post by pstadler »

microtonal wrote: post #31
traceroute66 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The MacBook Air M1 is passively cooled. Thanks for the correction My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. Thanks to you my credit card is trying to tempt me to pull it out of my wallet. ;-)

My mind was still on the old pre-M1 Air which did have a fan IIRC. And the fan on the Intel Air was loud and the CPU performance not great :(. The Intel Air and the M1 Air are like night and day. Even though I have the 14" Pro now, IMO the MacBook Air M1 is the most revolutionary Mac of the past decade, if not more.

Used an MBA M1 for a year before switching to a MBP 14" M1 Pro. The MBA is the best laptop I‘ve ever had. Fanless, light, insane battery life, always cool and blazingly fast. No noticeable difference between the M1 (8/7 16GB) vs. M1 Pro (10/14 32GB) in daily use, although I don’t usually depend on long running processes going full throttle.

I believe the entry-level MBA is the best laptop you can buy when it comes to price-performance ratio.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#54

Post by bornfreddy »

ataru wrote: post #6

I think it is market forces. Fanless laptops can be made, but the bulk of the market seeks reasonable performance at the best price. I think it doesn't matter much, as you can take a standard laptop and restrict the clock speed, and the fan will never turn on.

Does that really work? I would expect the fan to kick in based on temperature, not cpu frequency?

Or do you mean restricting clock speed based on temperature?

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#55

Post by capableweb »

moonbug wrote: post #51
capableweb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous What program are you using for writing said emails? That matters more than what user action you're performing. As a reference, using gmail in firefox makes my X1 very loud too, but I've moved to Thunderbird as of late and it's much more careful about resource usage.

ah "you are using it wrong", that famously helpful reply.

What? No, that's a very misleading framing of my comment...

Of course it matters what you do on a laptop when it comes to how the fans are reacting. Are you really expecting the fan to stay silent and the computer to stay cooled when compiling the Linux kernel for example?

Different workloads have impact of the thermals, it's as simple as that. Using heavy applications will make the laptop behave differently than if you use vim.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#56

Post by capableweb »

arketyp wrote: post #52
capableweb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having the fan spin for writing an email is just ridiculous What program are you using for writing said emails? That matters more than what user action you're performing. As a reference, using gmail in firefox makes my X1 very loud too, but I've moved to Thunderbird as of late and it's much more careful about resource usage.

I figure, basically, that I should be able to do whatever things I do on my phone without the fan spinning.

Sorry, I think maybe I misunderstood or something similar. I thought we were talking about laptops that use active cooling, not smartphones with passive cooling.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#57

Post by microtonal »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #33
microtonal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with the Mac Mini M1 is the same. We bought a Mini for our daughter. I use it sometimes to benchmark stuff on the vanilla M1. I don't think the fan every spun up. I can get the fans to spin up easily on my MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro), e.g. when building a large project like PyTorch. Luckily, the fans are not very loud. I can't hear it at the office (plenty of ambient noise), though I can hear it sometimes…

>or >= 16GB RAM My M1 Air has 16GB of RAM.

Sorry for the typo, of course I meant > 16GB. My wife's Air also has 16GB RAM :).

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#58

Post by hddherman »

c0l0 wrote: post #10

Yeah, I am disappointed that fanless devices have been on the retreat these past several years. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo Yoga 710, with a fanless Intel Core m3-6Y30 (Skylake, 2 cores with HT). Performance was more than adequate for her work as a scientist. My current laptop is a Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5, with the same CPU installed. It's powerful enough for everything I do on the go. If I were to replace it,…

To go fully passive while keeping the same amount of performance you need to use much more material, so in this case copper and/or aluminium. Moving that air around with a relatively cheap fan works well enough and allows for a smaller build.

This is also why it's generally recommended to go with a classic air cooler that just has the fan speed set to the lowest level over passive air coolers in desktop PC-s. It's still quiet, but you get the cooling performance while using much fewer resources.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#59

Post by Tade0 »

I don't know about Intel chips, but I have a "gaming" laptop with a Ryzen 4800HS (made with TSMC 7nm) on board that has appropriately oversized heat sinks and with the help of an alternative fan control software I was able to make it run mostly fanless after the fans developed rattle apparently connected with thermal expansion(only start to get noisy when run at low speeds after a gaming session).

With the fan off it sits at 65°C vs 55°C fan on when browsing the web and programming. It only approaches 80°C (threshold at which the fans engage) when viewing Google Maps or gaming.

I suppose I could make it run even colder if I repasted it.

In any case now that Apple isn't using TSMC's entire 5nm capacity anymore we should expect nice, fanless laptops to become more common. Lenovo recently released the X13s, which has the Snapdragon 8cx and glorious 20h+ battery life. The M1 Air is still faster, but some of us refuse to use their hardware and this device fills this niche.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there so few fanless laptops with Intel/AMD?

#60

Post by sseagull »

Daegalus wrote: post #12

I was in need of this a while ago. the best I found was the Surface Pro 7 with the i5. it's fanless. runs super well, I installed Linux on it. other than that, everything else I find has weak Celerons in it.

I just bought a Surface Pro 7+ with an i5 and 8gb of memory, and am really liking it. I was looking more for a tablet (with a real OS on it), but it doubles as a laptop in a pinch.

I have a more powerful desktop for heavier tasks, and this fills my portable needs very well.

(Haven’t put linux on it yet, but maybe soon. WSL is filling that void for now).

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