TLDR: CPU frequency on newer notebooks always at 1.6+GHz; fans are always on and loud; Is it a CPU problem?
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far! After looking for alternatives we’ve been eyeing the Razer Blade 14, Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus M16. If anyone has some experience with one of those devices, please let us know. Thank you!
Hello everyone!
Me and an acquaintance have recently bought new notebooks, one with an i9 13900H and one with an i7 12700H. We were both pretty unhappy with how loud the fans were even when basically doing nothing (had one tab in Firefox and the taskmanager open - using Windows 11). We found out, that the idle frequency of the CPUs on both devices was constantly quite high (min. 1.6GHz, most of the time even more, even though hwinfo tests showed that they should go down to ~0.8GHz). Our old notebooks (i7 8750, i7 7700) and a newer Thinkpad (i5 12500) don’t have this issue - the frequency drops to 0.8GHz and the fans turn off and stay silent. It’s possible to browse, code and do everything else that does not create much load on the CPU without the fans spinning up at all.
On all devices we used various tweaks (turning turbo boost off etc.), but it shows no effect on newer models.
So now we’re wondering if this is normal for newer notebooks (after 2018) or if there was something off with those notebooks in particular. Could AMD CPUs be better in that aspect?
We’ve both already returned those notebooks and can’t do further testing (tho even with the manufacturer support we found no solution).
If anyone has some more experience with that topic and maybe some insight on what we should look out for on new notebooks, any info is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.
That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.
If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.
Hi, I’m the second person mentioned in the post.
Yeah, ARM CPUs are a completely different beast, I hope that it will find some ground in the Linux/Windows space too (or maybe Risc-V). Not much hope for games though, at least not in the near future.
I’m eyeing the Razer Blade 14, which has pretty much the same hardware as your G14, so may I ask some questions? More than half of the time I’m using the Notebook, I’m programming and I’m quite sensitive when it comes to noise, so the question: do the fans of your G14 ever turn off in idle and low workloads? My current Blade 15 2018 does so and I don’t think I can compromise on that behavior but it’s slowly starting to struggle with games. (I’m generally more willing to compromise on top-end performance than noise on low workloads)
No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.
I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.
Ok thanks. That doesn’t sound that good.
An M1 is not really an option for me, due to several reasons, work related and ideologically, I really like to have control over my system, I’m only using Windows for gaming until Linux solutions are good enough - they may be already with Proton but I have to find some time to give them a try. There don’t seem to be that much other options in the mobile gaming market. I may try the Blade 14 (or maybe even the G14, we’ll see) it but if it doesn’t work the way I want, I’m probably not upgrading from my old Blade 15 for now (in Linux I got it down to about 5-10W while coding with medium brightness, in Windows I got it to be silent, no clue about energy usage itself). Maybe there will be some breakthroughs in the next years.
I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.
I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.
And that is exactly why I bought an M2 Air this year, price vs performance nothing beats the MacBooks at the moment.
FWIW, Proton has handled everything I’ve tried in my Steam library except Cities: Skylines. I spent eight hours just yesterday playing Factorio at 4K on KDE.
That said, I don’t play GPU-melting games in favour of $20-$30 indie games, so YMMV. I wasn’t even aware of Proton when Windows finally gave me one too many OneDrive entreaties, and I was pleasantly surprised by the state of affairs on Linux.
Doesn’t sound normal to me. But those newer CPUs can scale the frequency extremely fast, so looking at the numbers in Task Manager might not be too meaningful.
Didn’t have any heating/fan issues on a 13th gen Framework Laptop 13 in either Windows 11 or Linux. But haven’t exactly looked at the clocks either. And don’t have access to those notebooks currently.But the hardware vendors can mess up either thermal paste/cooling in gerneral, or force weird clock behavior via the bios/efi/acpi tables.
Thanks for the reply! We’ve done some benchmark tests with hwinfo, which confirmed the higher frequencies.
But it’s great to know that there are new models out there that don’t have such a big issue with that. May I ask what notebook you were using?
Framework Laptop 13 with 13th gen Intel.
Thanks for the info!
I’ve run into an issue once in the advanced power options in Windows. Under “processor power management” check to see what the minimum and maximum processor states are.
(note: don’t set the maximum to a low number, it makes the computer unusable. Found out the hard way lol)
Yah, makes for a great slideshow, found out the hard way too.
For our old devices we found out, that around 90% maximum CPU disables the Intel Turbo Boost (on Linux you can just disable it). It doesn’t make any notable difference for browsing, etc.
The new CPUs however didn’t like that at all (there’s some guide in the Windows forum how to throttle the performance cores via CLI, as the graphical Windows Energy Settings will just throttle the Efficiency Cores.).
I recently installed win10 on a 2019 Lenovo thinkpad x1 carbon, and it has similar issues. I don’t use it much, but I’ve wondered how much bloatware is affecting the cpu usage and therefore can speeds. It was running Ubuntu Linux before and while the fan came on sometimes, it was less often and less pronounced.
You could try a live Linux usb to see if you get similar results, that would point to a software issue.
Yea I feel like Windows is making it even ten times worse… I didn’t test it with linux unfortunately! One guess would have been that Windows 11 is the issue, but I didn’t dare to install Windows 10 in fear of losing the right to return it (not much of an expert in that field haha). I just find it a bit weird, my old Asus (Win10) gets loud easily too, but there I am able to throttle it down to stay quiet if I only need it for office work. With the new notebooks none of those tweaks had any effect, sadly (except for Windows becoming a slideshow…)
I doubt that a clean Windows 11 install causes issues. If anything it has better power management on 13th gen.
Oh does it? That’s interesting to know. Only used it for the testing now, but couldn’t really warm up to their new designs haha
Yes, this is pretty typical. Intel and AMD are currently battling for IPC and multi-threaded performance, efficiency be damned. AMD is definitely doing significantly better with efficiency, though. Check out some notebookcheck.net reviews of equivalent laptops between AMD and Intel, the Thinkpad T14s gen 3 is a great example. That T14s gen 3 AMD is a spectacular laptop, by the way, if you want a good balance of performance, build quality, battery, and quiet operation. We’ll see how the gen 4 does soon, but I have high hopes for the efficiency and performance of Zen4/RDNA3 in that machine, though I have a P14s gen 4 on order for 64GB of RAM.
You will also typically get quieter operation in Linux, at least after the support of the machine has matured a bit. I’m excited to give the new AMD P-State EPP driver a try, which is going default with the new kernel that just released yesterday.
Thanks, I’m quite happy with my work Thinkpad E14 Gen4 with a i5 12500, although that also doesn’t get completely silent, even though the fans are much more quiet than the Schenkers we had, especially in Idle.
The Problem with all the Reviews I can find for pretty much all Notebooks, that they don’t really state how silent they really get, i.e. if the fans turn off at all. It seems that this is not a very common issue for most people.
Right now I’m eying the Razer Blade 14 or the Asus Zephyrus G14, both using the Ryzen 9 7940HS, so if anyone has some experience with the fan noise of these or similar Notebooks (especially in a little bit tuned Linux environment), I would really like to hear some opinions - in another Comment we already discussed, that the G14 does not seem to get completely silent.
I have made some good experience in this regard with my Blade 15 2018 which is completely silent, so it’s hard for me to swap to device that isn’t.
I have an Ryzen+Radeon Zephyrus G14 from 2022. It’s been great, battery life and performance wise. I run Linux but I’m sure Windows is no worse in this regard.
The only thing I can say is that I misjudged the 14" form factor and regret not getting a 16" model, and the mechanism for lifting the laptop of the table with the lid works great on a table but makes the laptop largely unusable on your lap in the couch.
Thanks for the input! The Zephyrus models do look pretty good. I think I’d personally feel the same regarding the size of the 14", but sadly it seems the bigger models all come with the Intel CPUs
I have a 2021 G15, but it looks like the 2022 G15 is still ryzen, I’ve had really good experiences with it. Ive never fwlt like I needed more screen (15.6" is pretty close to 16"), and the battery is great. Just don’t get it if you need a webcam on the move! FYI, the Zephyrus naming convention is that G notebooks have AMD processors, and the M series have Intel.
Oh I see, the 2022 G15 has AMD, but all the 15"+ 2023 G models still have Intel. Generally the 2022 looks good as well, but the newer versions seem to be a bit better with the display and a few other things. I’ll still look into it and consider the older model too, thank you for the info!
Have you ran the vendors update utility? I see new Lenovos fairly often and their updates address various things that affect fan and cooling.
Have you adjusted the power plan at all? Use a default “balanced” power plan.
Is there an app that seems to have regular cpu usage?
Did you remove the ads-on antivirus software yet? It’s usually garbage. The built-in windows defender isn’t the best, but it’s good enough and usually doesn’t cause issues.
Yes, did all that! There was nothing running that should’ve caused any workload. We tried various tweaks, but unfortunately they all had no effect. The vendors support couldn’t really figure out what was the problem either, but found it just as odd as we did.
