TLDR: CPU frequency on newer notebooks always at 1.6+GHz; fans are always on and loud; Is it a CPU problem?

Edit: Thanks for the replies so far! After looking for alternatives we’ve been eyeing the Razer Blade 14, Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus M16. If anyone has some experience with one of those devices, please let us know. Thank you!

Hello everyone!

Me and an acquaintance have recently bought new notebooks, one with an i9 13900H and one with an i7 12700H. We were both pretty unhappy with how loud the fans were even when basically doing nothing (had one tab in Firefox and the taskmanager open - using Windows 11). We found out, that the idle frequency of the CPUs on both devices was constantly quite high (min. 1.6GHz, most of the time even more, even though hwinfo tests showed that they should go down to ~0.8GHz). Our old notebooks (i7 8750, i7 7700) and a newer Thinkpad (i5 12500) don’t have this issue - the frequency drops to 0.8GHz and the fans turn off and stay silent. It’s possible to browse, code and do everything else that does not create much load on the CPU without the fans spinning up at all.

On all devices we used various tweaks (turning turbo boost off etc.), but it shows no effect on newer models.

So now we’re wondering if this is normal for newer notebooks (after 2018) or if there was something off with those notebooks in particular. Could AMD CPUs be better in that aspect?

We’ve both already returned those notebooks and can’t do further testing (tho even with the manufacturer support we found no solution).

If anyone has some more experience with that topic and maybe some insight on what we should look out for on new notebooks, any info is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

  • Tschuuuls@feddit.deEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Doesn’t sound normal to me. But those newer CPUs can scale the frequency extremely fast, so looking at the numbers in Task Manager might not be too meaningful.
    Didn’t have any heating/fan issues on a 13th gen Framework Laptop 13 in either Windows 11 or Linux. But haven’t exactly looked at the clocks either. And don’t have access to those notebooks currently.

    But the hardware vendors can mess up either thermal paste/cooling in gerneral, or force weird clock behavior via the bios/efi/acpi tables.

    • mourningcrows@feddit.deOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the reply! We’ve done some benchmark tests with hwinfo, which confirmed the higher frequencies.

      But it’s great to know that there are new models out there that don’t have such a big issue with that. May I ask what notebook you were using?