Cosmos II - how hot does the case get vs. CPU?

[fraggle]

Hi all,

First apologies for the long post, and reading it back I may seem to be ranting a bit about heat output, but it is important to me!

I'm looking to replace my toaster^H HP Envy 15 due to it approaching retirement age and being thoroughly sick of it.

The HP has a high end Core i7 quad core (at the time it was made anyway) and as it's a thin and light laptop, and has a second heatsink and fan for the GPU the only possible way to use it on your lap was to create a custom power config with Min and Max CPU speeds set to 0% and everything else turned down to low, but it still toasted you after an hour. I bought it because I thought SpeedStep was the answer, and I can actually see them clocking down to 800MHz and upto 2.8GHz when needed, but at 800MHz they're chucking out about 80% of the top speed heat - a poor show.

When you are using it on high power settings in winter and can turn the house heating off AND open the window when it's snowing outside, you know you've got a problem.

Anyway, a friend recommended this place to me and I like what I see so far.

The Cosmos II spec I'm considering is (snipped not relevant parts)

Chassis & Display
Cosmos Series: 15.6" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 850M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk
1TB WD SCORPIO BLUE WD10JPVX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 8MB CACHE (5400 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND (£9)
Power Lead & Adaptor
2 x UK Power Lead & 120W AC Adaptor (£19)
Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence (£109)

TDPs for all the quad cores are 47W (37W for the dual cores), the GTX 850 is 30W (and if I choose the 840 says it cannot drive the full HD screen - why? It can output resolution far in excess of 1920 x 1080?)

My concern is I do not want to buy another leg toaster.

This laptop will, shock! horror!, spend nearly all it's life living on my lap, so has to run cool and not be that heavy.

So can any Cosmos II owners tell me how hot these things get? Dual core owners and quad core?

The TDP of all the quad core CPUs is exactly the same, so I assume that is the maximum heat output, and it *should* produce a lot less than that when it's not doing anything demanding, however I found out that that is not the case with the i7 in my HP.

Are the new Haswell quad core CPUs just like this, or do they significantly reduce their power consumption when ramping their clock speed down to the minimum?

The laptop will mostly be used for browsing, email, etc, but it will have Visual Studio for development and Photoshop for photo editing, but those two will only be done occasionally, and I'd rather do those demanding tasks slower and have a nice, cool laptop the rest of the time.

What would you PC Specialist people recommend? If the quad cores now actually do reduce heat output a lot when not doing much, I'll go with one, but if they're just like the one in my HP, *and* the dual cores run a lot cooler, which one of those would be the best? The i7 dual core?


Thanks,
Richard

 

[mantadog]

I cant comment specifically on the cosmos II as I don't have one but...

The whole point of the CPU underclocking dynamically is to save power, less power = less heat. So in theory your idea should work, it depends a lot on the cooler design though. Getting a dual core to save 10w of TDP is not going to be the answer, as TDP is when the chip is working flat out. If you got a dual core it would be working comparatively harder and outputting more heat than an i7. Basically they should output about the same heat all the time unless running a demanding application.

if you wanted to you could turn off the speed step function in the BIOS, that should make a significant difference (probably more than anything you can control through windows).

As far as the 840m not being able to drive the 1080p screen, its a chassis limitation not a hardware limitation. What the limitation is I don't know, but its not to do with the GPU being unable to drive it.

 

[fraggle]

Thanks Mantadog,

The CPU in this HP is Core I7 720QM, TDP of 45W so actually less than these range of quad core CPUs that are offered in the Cosmos, but I do realise that technology improves and there are differences in the SpeedStep implementation.

I guess I'm asking was the SpeedStep in the 720QM known to be poor, and is the SpeedStep in these (4810MQs) better?

And is the cooling implementation in these machines efficient and programmed to keep a low temp with the fan being used more, or higher temp with the fan being used less?

A pity about the main board config not allowing the 840 to drive the full HD panels, as that's a 10 watt saving there (when flat out obv.)

 

[mantadog]

The cosmos is known to have a fan that comes on more often than some people might like, but this would be a benefit to you I presume? The fan on the cosmos is certainly more active than on other models.

Even if they had identical TDP figures the 4710 would run much cooler if carrying out the same (fairly low intensity) task, all other things being equal. That's because the 720 has to work flat out to do the same work the 4710 would be doing at 1/3 load. Granted if you are video editing, the processor will work flat out and still get hot but do the job 3x quicker. So for office type work it should barely warm up at all as it's not working very hard at all.

As far as speed step goes, yes it is leaps ahead these days. I would be guessing at exactly what the 720qm does, but I know that with every revision it gets better and better. The holy grail for a laptop chip is to use as little power as possible (therefore less heat) but also it saves the battery. So with every revision they get better and better in terms of unnecessary power usage. The modern i7's undervolt themselves which saves power and produces less heat.

You could consider turning off turbo boost in the bios, as that's where the chip ramps up to maximum performance and really produces some heat.

The GPU issue is a non issue IMO, it will only ever use as much power as it needs to. So unless you are pushing it flat out for gaming it wont get hot.

 

[fraggle]

Cheers Manta,

Yes, the fan coming on more frequently / staying on longer and keeping the whole shooting match cooler is exactly what I am looking for. I'm rather deaf so the noise a fan makes won't bother me in the slightest. (the only reason I haven't installed something to set the fans on the HP running at max all the time is HPs insistance on using custom hardware chips and control, never found any software that even recognised the fans exist, never mind allowed me to control them)

Did a little bit of research on the benchmarks between my Q720 and the 4710MQ, Q720 score is ~3050, 4710MQ is ~8150. They've come on a long way since I got that HP! Only seems like last year when I bought it, but it must be 5 years ago or so.

Just ordered this one I've gone with the spec I quoted above but with a 7200RPM 750GB HDD and a BR ROM drive and Win 8.1 Pro.

Asked them to partition the HDD with 230GB primary partition which they'll install Windows onto, that's 15GB smaller than my SSD so I can just squirt the newly installed image onto the SSD, leaving the 15GB as a dedicated swap partition (sorry, paging file partition in Windows speak ) and can then use the full 750GB for the rest of the 'stuff'.

I am a tad concerned about the resolution of the screen, I ain't no spring chicken and the Sony Vaio I'm on now has a 17" screen with a max res of 1900x1200 and in that setting it's painful to work with for any length of time, but XP really isn't good at scaling things which is the main reason for going with Windows 8.1 - it's supposedly the best Windows so far for scaling the UI and I'm reconning that 125% or 150% scaling will be just fine for every day use and then put it back to 100% for proper "work".


I must be a bit sad as I've still got every laptop I have ever bought, going right back to a Windows 3.1 Mitac 6120 - just can't seem to throw them away and everyone else in the family has modern stuff

 

[mantadog]

Scaling is indeed the best it's ever been, it's still not perfect (probably never will be) but far far better than XP for sure!

I hear what your saying re having every laptop you ever bough, I had planned to keep every desktop I ever bough so I could wheel em out in the years to come and say "hey kids, look at this. It's called windows XP and it was amazing, yeah screens were that size once. Not touching it doesn't do anything..."

But alas I don't have room, 1 of them died and meh I had to bin the lot.