The Alienware 15 is a fast, heavy gaming laptop that’s more of a desktop replacement than a portable rig. But it won’t make your system slow to a crawl. Some might argue it will decrease long-term durability - though that’s outside the scope of this test. Using a laptop on a surface that retains heat, or blocks the intake of cool air, will give you a case of sweaty palms. At best, they were high enough to be very uncomfortable. At the worst, as with the Alienware 15, they shot high enough to be potentially hazardous. With that said, using the laptops on a sleeping bag did drastically increase external temperatures. Buying a laptop cooler under the theory that it may improve performance or stability seems a waste of money, and you can comfortably use a modern laptop in sub-optimal conditions without concern that it’ll overheat and reboot (or worse). That means system temperature does not significantly impact speed. None of the laptops crashed or turned off automatically, not even when we ran the 3DMark benchmark to engage both the processor and the graphics chip. Performance was identical more often than not. Surprisingly, the laptops did not experience significant slowdown when placed on the sleeping bag. Detailed results can be found in the links below, but if you want the summary, here’s what happened. Three laptops were tested the Alienware 15, the Lenovo ThinkPad T450s, and the Asus UX305. We tracked all of these statistics throughout both tests so we could chart the data and identify trends. In some cases, it was able to read the processor’s reported maximum temperature, and would also track if a core was OK or Hot. We used RealTemp to keep a time-stamped log of each core’s temperature, the GPU’s temperature, and the overall clock speed. We spread the sleeping bag out flat on a table, then set the laptop on top. Then we used a sleeping bag as a proxy for a situation where your laptop might not be able to vent well – like a bed, or your lap. To see how these tests impacted performance in different environments we ran them first with each laptop on a flat, solid desk, with no obstructions around it to prevent venting hot air or pulling in cool air. These strain most components of a laptop, and of course place heavy load on the GPU, which is often the hottest chip in a modern PC. It’s a series of four graphical tests – short sequences that are increasingly difficult to render. The second utility is Futuremark’s 3DMark program. It places constant load on the processor, forcing it to fire up and run as quickly as it can. It has a built-in benchmarking utility that compresses and decompresses data which resembles an assortment of files. The first test we used was 7-Zip, a common utility for packing and unpacking. M2 MacBook Air struggles with heat, and we now know why Why rollable laptop screens look way more useful than foldable ones This bike desk lets you power your laptop with your workout If you’re not using it yet, but do use your computer at night, you really should try it out today. You can also completely disable f.lux for one hour (for doing color-sensitive work such as photo editing), or until the next morning.į.lux was a very good app to begin with, and this release only makes it better. That’s where Movie Mode comes in: This mode tones down the color effects for 2.5 hours, to let you watch a movie without having everything tinged red. It uses Kelvin notations (commonly used for color temperatures), but also offers human-readable explanations ranging from “Ember” (1200k) to “Sunlight” (5000k).Īll of these color changes are great, unless you happen to be trying to watch a movie. Since we don’t all work with the same ambient lighting, f.lux lets you dial in a color temperature for nighttime. You can dial in your own nighttime color temperature to suit your environment. This makes videos unwatchable, but also means you can probably use your computer at 3am without losing your night vision. Whereas the normal f.lux effect just warms up your colors, Darkroom Mode completely takes over your display, shading everything in dark, reddish hues. Another new feature is the so-called Darkroom Mode.
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