MYTHLOGIC Pollux 1400: Clevo's W150HR Tested
by Jarred Walton on August 23, 2011 12:00 AM ESTTemperatures and Noise Levels
Before we wrap things up, there are a couple more areas to examine. First up, we haven’t mentioned temperatures or noise levels so far. Let’s start with the temperatures.
Remember that the goal of a laptop is to balance performance, temperatures, and noise so that all areas stay in spec. 100C on at least one of the CPU cores is a lot higher than we’d like, but Intel specs the chip at up to 100C. Is it too hot or is it "within spec"? Part of the answer depends on how noisy you want your laptop to get and whether you're using it on your lap or on a table. Personally, I'd rather have a slightly bulkier chassis that didn't get so hot.
As for the noise, at idle the laptop performs quite well, measuring near the ~30dB noise floor at 31.3dB. At idle and low loads we also don’t have any concerns with the temperatures. Where things get interesting is at higher loads. The W150HR appears to have just three fan speeds: low (idle), medium (usually cooling off from heavy load), and 100% (heavy load for more than ~15 seconds). I even covered the exhaust port for 45 seconds with my hand while running our maximum load (3DMark06 looping with Cinebench 11.5 SMP looping), and the fan speed still didn’t increase, so our load results do appear to be “worst-case”.
Here’s the problem. The Clevo P151HM kept the CPU at a relatively frosty 71C under heavy load, but noise levels hit 44.3dB (and if you cover the exhaust for a bit, you can even get one more fan speed that puts noise levels at ~46dB). In contrast, the W150HR under 100% CPU load, or playing a game, or maxing out both the CPU and GPU tops out at “only” 41.5dB. With the CPU hitting up to 100C (81C on the GPU), however, one more fan speed would have been useful. I suspect maximum Turbo Boost speeds are also not kicking in under sustained loads.
We should note that during all of our tests (on both W150HR notebooks), we never had any stability problems, so at least short-term the tradeoff of heat for lower noise works (and granted, the GPU isn’t as powerful/hot as the GTX 560M and even 580M that go into the P150HM). Long-term, though, more noise and/or better ventilation to reduce temperatures into the 80-90C range under load would have been preferable.
Also a quick disclaimer on that battery wear level: I think HWMonitor (or something in the Clevo batteries) isn't reporting the correct data. At one point in earlier testing, the wear level registered 5%, but battery life in the idle test was actually lower than when wear level measured 12%. I have now charged/discharged the batteries over two dozen times each, and both have settled in at 12-14% wear and seem content to stay there.
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CAndrews - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Is a review of the W520 coming?JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Sadly, no. Lenovo has not sent any review samples to us for a couple years.TotalLamer - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Oh really... ? What did you guys do to piss in their Cheerios? Haha.But on another note... any chance of a review on the 3830TG you mentioned? It's a nice looking machine and seems like the only notebook that can even come close to competing with everything you can get in a Sony Vaio SA (except for the 1600x900 display) but I've heard not-so-nice things about the heat dissipation
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Yes, I'm working on the review. And it really *is* a nice looking machine with no major issues so far. I haven't tried stress-testing it for heat yet, and that may be the one area where it has some problems. We'll see.TotalLamer - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Yeah... I've heard there's throttling. Lots and lots of throttling. BAD throttling.JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I thought I saw something stating the GPU speed was 600MHz at one point when I was messing around (instead of the normal 672MHz of the GT 540M). Considering the dimensions of the chassis, I was actually quite shocked that they have the 540M in there.hybrid2d4x4 - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
I briefly had the lowest-end config with the 2310 cpu and it throttled down to 1.3GHz under Prime95 without anything stressing the GPU, so I'm pretty sure I know what result you'll get, Jarred.Still, at $600 you get a really good feature set and hardware for the money but the quality control is non-existing. Of the 3 I had, 2 had corruption in HDMI output that made it unusable and 1 had half the keyboard keys not working. Going to play the lottery some more today to try and get a working one...
rallstarz - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review! I am trying to decide between the W150HR and the Dell XPS 15. Since I don't much mind for limited battery life and don't mind so much the nonstandard keyboard, it seems that the Clevo gives the best bang for the performance buck. My only concern is the longevity of the laptop. Do you know if pushing the thermal specs will significantly decrease longevity? Also (and I know you touched on this) for general use/gaming, does the system hit max cpu load for an extended period of time, or is your "worst-case" scenario truly a situation that the system does not generally hit?mythlogic - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Hey, I carry around one of these for my own use. It only gets REALLY hot (and never ever really hits 100 under "normal use") when i'm gaming on it, but just sitting on my lap its never too bad, or on a desk.JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
Playing a game for a couple hours, you can expect to hit CPU temperatures of around 90-94C, which is hot but not quite 100C.