Should tablets have fans? - Analyzing tablet PC performance

[Redaktion]

Should your next "laptop" be a tablet? These small, very portable machines have been only getting better in recent times. Are they fast enough to replace laptops, or are they still behind the curve?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Should-tablets-have-fans-Analyzing-tablet-PC-performance.446073.0.html

[heffeque]

Definitely no. I got the i5 (fanless) Pro 6 over the i7 because it's thinner and 100% silent.

Not commenting on the chamber thing because I don't have experience with it.

[Gary]

NBC was predicting the demise of tablets 2 years Ago...

[Gary]

As for power... Ditch Windows...Android is faster, painless, never crashes, suffer driver issues,  data exchanged seamlessly between my apps thru share...  hell, I even run Computer fluid Dynamic simulations on my SAMSUNG S4... on software that cost $10... (WINDTUNNELCFD)...

[Digitalguy]

Surface pro 7 has enough power in its fanless version that it's fine as it is. Problem with fans is that manufacturers rarely give you full control. When they give you some control they are too conservative (like if you can turn the fan off you pc will slow down terribly)
We need OEM that have a great passive heat dissipation (like MS on the surface pro or Acer in it's liquid loop), but also give you the option to turn on the fan when YOU decide, not automatically, for more power.
Not happening unfortunately.. So if I can I go fanless

[pengfei]

definitely not, actually I'd like manufacturers to offer more fanless options for ultraportable notebooks too

[frogg]

For those interested, i bought 6 months ago a Thinkpad X1 Tablet 1st gen (2016) on eBay for 400€. For 2 reasons, trackpoint and Linux support.Low power Core M5 CPU, fanless of course. Windows 10 was slow, not responsive and the back of the tablet was hot. Installed Ubuntu 18 on another partition. What a change! Doesn't heat anymore, doesn't lag when browsing with Firefox. A joy to use. Upgraded to 19.10 recently, it's even more faster! Perfect for web and mail. Next year i will buy the 2nd gen, which is supposedly a bit more efficient. But in no way i will buy the 3d gen with a fan.

I boot the Windows partition once a month, for special purpose. What a crap! 6 hours for an update, 3 or 4 reboot! A nightmare! In fact you need a powerful CPU just for running Windows..

[Astar]

This writer has missed the mark by not even getting the facts right. Do the homework!

The Acer Switch Alpha 12 (12.1" display) was the first fanless tablet with a Skylake Intel i5 full-fat CPU - all because it had a "liquid loop" copper vapour chamber for passive cooling. That was circa 2016 for heaven's sakes! Before its launch, all fanless tablets were either m-core/Atom under-powered stuff (which includes Android/iOS only). Even then tests showed impressive performance that didn't throttle even under sustained load. Since then its been superceded by the Acer Switch 5 and 7 successor models. The writer apparently never knew!

I bought it for those fanless and full power i5 reasons (no AMD option then). An example of sustained load workflow was doing RAW file conversions to TIFF files or video editing and rendering (1080p videos) and it worked well even with only 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. After banging it and cracking its screen, I have upgraded to a larger screen regular 14" ultrabook (found an unexpectedly great bargain) - But I do miss the fanless characteristic and portability.

Once AMD's 7mm Zen 2 Renoir APUs launch in early 2020, I'm sure there will be a lot of fanless tablets choices and I might just go back to that!

[Loki Rautio]

The Acer Switch Alpha 12 (12.1" display) was the first fanless tablet with a Skylake Intel i5 full-fat CPU - all because it had a "liquid loop" copper vapour chamber for passive cooling. That was circa 2016 for heaven's sakes! Before its launch, all fanless tablets were either m-core/Atom under-powered stuff (which includes Android/iOS only). Even then tests showed impressive performance that didn't throttle even under sustained load. Since then its been superceded by the Acer Switch 5 and 7 successor models. The writer apparently never knew!

I bought it for those fanless and full power i5 reasons (no AMD option then). An example of sustained load workflow was doing RAW file conversions to TIFF files or video editing and rendering (1080p videos) and it worked well even with only 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. After banging it and cracking its screen, I have upgraded to a larger screen regular 14" ultrabook (found an unexpectedly great bargain) - But I do miss the fanless characteristic and portability.

Hi! Thanks for the comment, but I believe you're missing my point in my article. I was looking specifically for modern tablet PCs with quad-core processors. The mentioned tablet PCs are running 7th gen and older ULV processors, which aren't nearly as hard to cool. 8th gen and newer i5s and i7s are much harder to cool.

The Acer Switch 7 you mentioned does in fact use an 8th gen chip, but the performance it achieves during our stress test isn't without throttling. 400 Mhz across four cores is pretty pitiful, even for a tablet. Regardless of your personal experience, it's necessary to use an objective testing standard (like stress tests) to determine how well a device cools compared to others. Unfortunately, the Acer Switch 7 isn't a good example.

If there is a good example I did miss (that fits in line with the performance tests I was doing), feel free to let me know!