Comparing W700 Cooling with Clevos
Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2016 3:35 pm
I thought I'd share this with you guys since it's a tad bit interesting, and I showed it to my friend in Colorado who works on laptops, he found it to be a good laugh.
As we all know, one of the reasons Thinkpads are so fantastic is because of the way they manage heat, as evidenced by this big photo of the underside of a Thinkpad W700:
Very crude diagram (drawn in Lightshot), but demonstrates precisely what happens to the heat in the W700. All the hot components are in the back of the laptop, and the heat is dispersed over a great volume, and with redundancy between the GPU and CPU. Critically important is that the Hard Drives and Battery are completely isolated from any points of extreme heat. Exceptional engineering for a laptop (although to be fair... they had plenty of space to work with)
Here's the Clevo M980NU, which eventually became the X8100. This was made to rival the king Alienware, the M18x, and it certainly did... It was bigger and carried more gear. 18.4" screen, 3 dedicated 2.5" HDD Bays and a Blu-Ray drive, possible SLI GPU configurations, 10 Macro buttons, etc. Critically, this refined the general cooling setup Clevo came up with in the D901C, which just blasts all the heat rearward. Similar principle to the Thinkpad, but pushes more air to the individual component. Important for isolating the GPUs for servicing and upgrades.
And here's why I posted this topic:
So... you know proper cooling, efficient heat dissipation, isolating components, quietness, etc? The D900T takes a hatchet to all that.
To be fair, the D900T is the first Clevo monster to use a desktop socket CPU (LGA775). So they didn't really have something to look back to and say "hmm... well this didn't work", it was the first time anyone had tried cramming this kind of hardware into that kind of a profile. Although... I'm pretty sure someone at some point would've thought it was a bad idea to sandwich the giant 12-cell battery with both the GPU and the CPU, the two hottest running components in the computer. Also- the GPU is it's own self-contained module beneath the leftmost area of the palmrest, and is mostly Aluminum with copper pipes to the fins. This kept the card (and your palm) VERY hot, usually above 50C regardless of fan speed when the card was being used. Also, that big fan in the middle? It's more shallow than the CPU fans (which are more than an inch thick, btw), but it's only duty really is to woft air onto the 4 RAM bays. It's literally just screwed into that hatch, and is attached to it when you remove it.
I will say however- if you have a tin cup for warm beverages, it's a great idea to keep it to the left of the computer in front of the GPU vent, to keep it toasty.
As we all know, one of the reasons Thinkpads are so fantastic is because of the way they manage heat, as evidenced by this big photo of the underside of a Thinkpad W700:
Very crude diagram (drawn in Lightshot), but demonstrates precisely what happens to the heat in the W700. All the hot components are in the back of the laptop, and the heat is dispersed over a great volume, and with redundancy between the GPU and CPU. Critically important is that the Hard Drives and Battery are completely isolated from any points of extreme heat. Exceptional engineering for a laptop (although to be fair... they had plenty of space to work with)
Here's the Clevo M980NU, which eventually became the X8100. This was made to rival the king Alienware, the M18x, and it certainly did... It was bigger and carried more gear. 18.4" screen, 3 dedicated 2.5" HDD Bays and a Blu-Ray drive, possible SLI GPU configurations, 10 Macro buttons, etc. Critically, this refined the general cooling setup Clevo came up with in the D901C, which just blasts all the heat rearward. Similar principle to the Thinkpad, but pushes more air to the individual component. Important for isolating the GPUs for servicing and upgrades.
And here's why I posted this topic:
So... you know proper cooling, efficient heat dissipation, isolating components, quietness, etc? The D900T takes a hatchet to all that.
To be fair, the D900T is the first Clevo monster to use a desktop socket CPU (LGA775). So they didn't really have something to look back to and say "hmm... well this didn't work", it was the first time anyone had tried cramming this kind of hardware into that kind of a profile. Although... I'm pretty sure someone at some point would've thought it was a bad idea to sandwich the giant 12-cell battery with both the GPU and the CPU, the two hottest running components in the computer. Also- the GPU is it's own self-contained module beneath the leftmost area of the palmrest, and is mostly Aluminum with copper pipes to the fins. This kept the card (and your palm) VERY hot, usually above 50C regardless of fan speed when the card was being used. Also, that big fan in the middle? It's more shallow than the CPU fans (which are more than an inch thick, btw), but it's only duty really is to woft air onto the 4 RAM bays. It's literally just screwed into that hatch, and is attached to it when you remove it.
I will say however- if you have a tin cup for warm beverages, it's a great idea to keep it to the left of the computer in front of the GPU vent, to keep it toasty.