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Are there some laptops that don't make a ridiculous amount of noise cooling?

3 points by Pooge ↗ HN
I currently own and am using a Dell XPS daily. Every laptop I've owned has been an absolute noise factory.

Hell, I'm not even launching Steam because the laptop gets too hot.

Are there some laptops out there that are actually well-cooled?

4 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] thread
vegai_
Apple Macbooks are the obvious answer. The Air models don't even have fans.

Or you might take your PC and tune its processor power plans to be less aggressive, or limit TDP settings. That said, my previous Thinkpad E14 wasn't that loud even with high loads, without tweaking anything.

But also, consider my Asus gaming laptop, G14. It's relatively silent but on default settings hard crashes about once an hour due to overheating. Perhaps loud fans are preferable to that.

db48x
Not without adding four or five pounds of heatsinks, and larger fans. Bigger fans = less noise. A desktop machine with four 120mm fans will be quieter than your laptop.
ananiochita
Have you tried a fanless one ? Some Surface models with i5 or i3 for instance are fanless. Or a MacBook, as mentioned. They work well.

Not a gamer myself though. Personally, since trying a humble Celeron fanless laptop for kids once that made no noise whatsoever, I had a revelation, and never went back. I'd rather edit code on a slower machine than use a more powerful but nerve-wracking machine if it comes to that. ( Can't tolerate some frequencies at all. AC, fridges, laptop fans .. )

airbreather
If you are keen there are some cooling mods that can be done to most XPS models to improve passive cooling.

Also, I found win 10 was continuously running the fan so hard I could use my 9550 for zoom or Skype because of the noise. I put some effort into quieting it but gave up.

But I put Ubuntu on it and it ran the fan heaps less and lower straight up.