jestermgee wrote: ↑Tue Mar 31, 2020 1:04 am
I have a feeling the whole laptop body is now part of the heatsink so it's designed to just get hot.
Macbooks have used the big lump of aluminium they’re machined out of as a heatsink for many years. iPads and iPhones use their aluminium alloy backs as heatsinks and get quite warm sometimes. A MacBook case is actually a decent heatsink - a heatsink that doesn’t end up get somewhere near to the temperature of what it’s attached to isn’t working properly.
Polycarbonate cased PCs often have very poor internal cooling, but you don’t feel it because the case doesn’t get hot, just what’s inside it.
i9s do seem to run quite hot, which implies their power usage maybe isn’t as efficient as would be ideal but they are what they are and it’s unlikely Intel, Apple or any other manufacturer with a reputation to worry about would knowingly build products that overheat. The question is whether the cpu/gpu routinely gets so hot it starts to self-throttle. The i9 is also touted by Intel as a kind of cheaper alternative to the Xeon W range, the Xeons being designed to run hard for hours at a time without problems while the i9 is more intended for applications that sometimes benefit from the extra speed but where it still gets lots of time at or close to idle - unlike the cpu in a DAW that has to run a low audio buffer and do a lot of thread processing non-stop.
The hottest-running cpu I’ve personal experience of was a Pentium D which ran really hot while using much more power than any quad core i7 and had a lower thermal limit and no ability to self-throttle. It took a big heatsink with two big fans plus two big case fans to get the temperature and fan noise down to acceptable levels. One of my nephews recently had an i9 gaming PC laptop for his birthday and it runs like a little with the fans whining away all the time. I have some doubts that i9s in particular are a good processor for anything that pushes the cpu into much of a sustained load in any laptop or if fan noise is an issue - they’re also battery eaters, even more so than the i7 in my MBP, which I think of more as a portable computer than a laptop for hours of use running on the battery.
Live 10 Suite, 2020 27" iMac, 3.6 GHz i9, MacOS Catalina, RME UFX, assorted synths, guitars and stuff.
