Opinion: PC makers need to step it up and create quieter gaming laptops

[Redaktion]

We're tired of gaming laptops sounding like hair dryers. While performance has been steadily increasing over the years, fan noise has remained about the same no matter how "sexy" or "exotic" the latest chassis designs may be. It's about time for PC makers to cook up something truly revolutionary in laptop cooling.


https://www.notebookcheck.net/Opinion-PC-makers-need-to-step-it-up-and-create-quieter-gaming-laptops.426698.0.html

[codeHusky]

Of all of the things wrong with current gaming laptops, you complain about the fan noise? Really?

There are tons of gaming laptops that underperform, while being more expensive than some of their similar counterparts due to poor heatsink design. I think that people would rather have a laptop that runs games better than having a laptop that is slightly less noisy under load.

This just seems like a silly petty complaint. Again, there are TONS of gaming laptops that thermal throttle or sit at low wattages, plenty of gaming laptops that are absolutely neutered by heat. That's the biggest issue, not some whirring you can barely hear under the speakers of your laptop, or your headphones.

[LWT]

Bravo.

You'll cop some flak from the neckbeards who cannot comprehend that there's people out there who use these machines in shared spaces.
But you're absolutely right. Fan noise is pretty much at an all time high right now. It's incredibly disappointing.

However, I would argue that your reviews don't touch enough on the various power settings given by each manufacturer.

For instance, the noise difference between a Razer Blade (15 or 17) using Balanced or Gaming mode is huge. Meanwhile, the fps drop while in-game is actually quite low (also, good to see Razer innovating with their Vapour Chamber cooling).
Asus likewise offers Silent Mode... But the 20w CPU really shaves a lot of frames in games.

Regardless, manufactures should reallt aim to provide a quiet gaming mode which hits low 40 db's, and an extreme mode which hits 50 db.

[Clippy]

While PC makers hold some responsibility, I would put some blame on Intel. As the so called industry leader, they should also be working to improve efficiency of their process but instead they have just been increasing cores and clock speeds on the same tired process node to the point that it's rather difficult to cool. The fact that PC makers have been trying everything now from undervolting to even liquid metal - things that end users usually do, has me thinking PC makers are at their wits end of trying to give consumers light portability or heavy powerhouse while maintaining temperatures all because Intel has failed on providing us more efficient cpus.

[MNet]

Most of those gaming laptops you can in fact run quiet, in fact most have software to select a quieter profile.   You obviously won't get the maximum gaming performance but they still perform quite well.

Honestly nothing needs to change IMHO.  We already have each of these having easy software to enable a quiet or loud profile, often with physical buttons on the keyboard even for super ease of use.

[Keith Simon]

Bravo.

You'll cop some flak from the neckbeards who cannot comprehend that there's people out there who use these machines in shared spaces.
But you're absolutely right. Fan noise is pretty much at an all time high right now. It's incredibly disappointing.

However, I would argue that your reviews don't touch enough on the various power settings given by each manufacturer.

For instance, the noise difference between a Razer Blade (15 or 17) using Balanced or Gaming mode is huge. Meanwhile, the fps drop while in-game is actually quite low (also, good to see Razer innovating with their Vapour Chamber cooling).
Asus likewise offers Silent Mode... But the 20w CPU really shaves a lot of frames in games.

Regardless, manufactures should reallt aim to provide a quiet gaming mode which hits low 40 db's, and an extreme mode which hits 50 db.

nah, just neckbeards who understand thermal dynamics .

figure out how to disappate 100 degrees Celsius of heat with only an inch of clearance and no noise and you will evolve a lot more than laptops.

[Alexander Broner]

I think there is a segment of the market for quieter gaming laptops. You might not be in this segment, but we do exist. I for example game from a reclined position due to a neck injury, often with the laptop right in front of my face. Other people don't want to have to wear headphones or are sharing their space with other people.

To some degree the laptop industry has "solved" the problem of quiet gaming laptops by offering laptops with lower performing GPUs which are often quieter.  While this might work for some people, others will want higher levels of performance.

External GPU technology can help fill this niche. The Sonnet breakaway puck for example is somewhat portable and very quiet. When AMD comes out with its next generation of GPUs hopefully Sonnet will update the puck to include more powerful models.

Beyond these two options, quieter gaming will need either technical breakthroughs in cooling tech or innovation in the laptop form factor. 

[DeepskyScorpion]

I would agree, but the reality is these laptops are already overbuilt for Intel's 45W standard. There needs to be changes from both the laptop cooling system, *AND* the power of the chips in them.

On one hand, the cooling tech needs to get better. Not only do they need to use creative chassi and cooler designs like zephyrus' lift hinges and razer's vapor chambers, they need to simply get bigger. The chips they put in these laptops are chips that demands the most exotic of cooling even on desktops. Computers with custome water cooling, or air coolers weighting mroe than entire gaming laptops. They need to put better cooling systems on there, in quality and quantity.

On the other, they need to use chips with less power. On the CPU side, on gaming laptops the sole purpose of the CPU is not to starve the GPU. And when you already stave these GPU's with a famine diet of under 100W, seldom will you see even a 4C8T chip holding them back. While the GPU side already see MAX-Q using a massively underpowered big turing chip to push the same performance as the lower end chip could with less power, this is needlessly driving up the price for minimal efficiency gain. Chill on the CPU, let the GPU use that power. Other than that, Nvidia should consider bigger TU 11X chips without RT cores and Tensor cores, for the sake of efficiency.

We recently saw the 1660 Ti Max-Q and Ryzen 3750H in the GA502 laptop, and if we simply put the lift hinge back in there with a non-max-q 1660 Ti, or on the other direction allow a 1660 to be in there, that would make a much more sensible combination, sacrificing some performance for a lower price tag and less noise.

[Alexander Broner]

I was thinking also about sound suppression: Are there ways to design the case to reduce the amount of sound that we actually hear? I'm thinking like the muffler on an engine or sound insulation material in buildings.  Now obviously whenever one is talking sound insulation there's the potential of heat insulation as well, but perhaps there are ways to dissipate heat past the sound suppressing material.

[Alexander Broner]

Along those lines, it would be interesting to see what can be done with Intel's U series chips. Perhaps also factory undervolting? A few multimedia laptops dabble in the U series along with GTX 1050/1650 but I haven't seen anything 1060/1660 and up paired with these.

I would agree, but the reality is these laptops are already overbuilt for Intel's 45W standard. There needs to be changes from both the laptop cooling system, *AND* the power of the chips in them.

On one hand, the cooling tech needs to get better. Not only do they need to use creative chassi and cooler designs like zephyrus' lift hinges and razer's vapor chambers, they need to simply get bigger. The chips they put in these laptops are chips that demands the most exotic of cooling even on desktops. Computers with custome water cooling, or air coolers weighting mroe than entire gaming laptops. They need to put better cooling systems on there, in quality and quantity.

On the other, they need to use chips with less power. On the CPU side, on gaming laptops the sole purpose of the CPU is not to starve the GPU. And when you already stave these GPU's with a famine diet of under 100W, seldom will you see even a 4C8T chip holding them back. While the GPU side already see MAX-Q using a massively underpowered big turing chip to push the same performance as the lower end chip could with less power, this is needlessly driving up the price for minimal efficiency gain. Chill on the CPU, let the GPU use that power. Other than that, Nvidia should consider bigger TU 11X chips without RT cores and Tensor cores, for the sake of efficiency.

We recently saw the 1660 Ti Max-Q and Ryzen 3750H in the GA502 laptop, and if we simply put the lift hinge back in there with a non-max-q 1660 Ti, or on the other direction allow a 1660 to be in there, that would make a much more sensible combination, sacrificing some performance for a lower price tag and less noise.