RTX v RTX Max Q?

just 5 TB? exactly, go big or go home!

 

Given you own a "thin and light" laptop and continuously stress it what do you think about the battery concerns mentioned in this thread?

 

So not what the asus zephyrus did?

Haha. It looks like their trying an any cost not to have a vent open directly on anywhere someone's legs might be

 

Thought the point of that was to direct most of the airflow over that bottom cover. Making vents in a location that won't be blocked by a user's legs is likely a side effect.

 

I don't worry about battery inflation as much as I worry about battery capacity degradation.

Which is why I cap the maximum battery charge to 70-80% so the battery degrades slower. Besides, a partially charged battery also degrades slower compared to a fully charged one at higher temperatures.

 

Excellent. Makes sense

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Looks like this laptop is aching for modification...

 

Drill gun?

 

Heat isnt great for a battery, but not the main reason why batteries can go bad and swell.

In general it a bad battery design where they are holding a too high charge (to boost capacity) and cheap battery chemistry. The battery temps in the Zephyrus G series look pretty okay based on the ultrabookreview site. I have seen m much higher in machines where the batteries did last for years. Razer had the same issue for years, even in their Ultrabook lineup which dont run that hot.

I am spending pretty much all my off time on gaming, music production etc. Pretty serious about gaming I would say. But still doing it on a 15inch thin n light. Why? I want my laptop always with me when I go to work and or to other countries. I want all data with me without constantly lugging around 3KG of laptop weight. The bit lower framerate (but still around 80~90fps on 1440P in 80% of the games that I play) is fine for me).

 

Yeah that's a pretty good reason to go for a thin and light. What music do you make BTW

 

Yup, there are other reasons that can cause the battery to fail and swell, but the heat issue is a big one and affects all chemistry - some more than others - but a higher environmental temp when charging and discharging under load will cause more failures than a lower temperature.

So the slim laptops that can't / don't vent heat will cook the batteries with a larger percentage of swollen failures than a large laptop with adequate cooling. The thin and light laptops just don't have the volume to hold enough mass to sink the heat and large enough heat exchangers or fans to expel the heat.

The large frame laptops have the physical characteristics that allow them to pack in cooling hardware enough to vent out the heat constantly enough to keep the laptop from heat soaking - holding in the heat until it builds up to dangerous levels for the battery.

You can also get bad battery design and chemistry which we've seen in laptops and phones. But the heat issue is what causes the failures even with good battery design and chemistry - IDK if they can come up with a design / chemistry to stop swollen batteries that are heat soaked.

They could design the battery with active cooling? - but there again more room would be needed for the battery active cooling and there is no such room in a thin and light laptop.

It makes sense to buy a large frame laptop if performance is your goal - gaming in AAA games for one - as the small thin laptops can't handle continuous load without continuously building up heat.

 

Rather than size and cooling being the issue, I think that it's due to most thin and lights being made out of aluminium which conducts heat very well compared to say, plastic which is found on thicker laptops.

The aluminium chassis will spread the heat throughout the laptop which may be good for cooling, but bad for other components like the battery.

Maybe they can wrap the battery with polystyrene or some heat insulating material?

 

Another good point, the battery is sinked right to the heat source through the frame / chassis, which is a design requirement for these super thin laptops, the normal cooling components don't have enough mass to sink the heat away from the CPU / GPU and the heat exchangers + fan's don't have enough power to expel all of the heat, so the designers used the frame / chassis component mass to wick the heat away and the surface area of the chassis can expel the heat via air conduction - convection.

I don't think insulation would be enough, and again that would add thickness to the design - thick enough insulation would be very thick and compressed into the frame there could still be enough conduction into the battery past the insulation.

I've thought for quite a while that the battery / power / charging should be taken completely external from the laptop. That would result in a larger power brick but the battery enclosure could be designed with heat pipes + active fan cooling to keep the battery cold without making the laptop thicker.

Maybe make the external brick modular, with a section holding the battery only for portable use - you could buy / carry more than one external battery as well - and keep the charger / power brick separate.

It's gotta be the next step for these thin and light laptops to make them thinner and lighter, and safer.

 

Insulating battery is a big no-no, battery HEATS UP during discharge. You would kill it faster if you will insulate. The best solution is to add extra vents around the battery, so for example the air would be taken from the front of laptop, go around the battery and exhausted through the back and side air exhausts. This is easy to implement in most laptops and this would provide optimum airflow since the air will be taken from the area farthest from CPU and GPU (meaning the air will have lowest possible temperature) and adding vents on the front will allow people to place laptops on soft sufrace without completely restricting airflow. This will also NOT make laptop thicker and will NOT add a HUGE inconvenience such as "external battery with extra annoying cable which requires extra space".

 

You would need to make room for the air channels in the battery, which would need to make the room the battery system takes larger - making the laptop thicker. Plus, you need active cooling to push / draw air through those battery vents, adding room and weight again.

There's really no way around it, thin laptops aren't good designs for high performance gaming because they can't be made to vent the heat fast enough as generated by the CPU / GPU under continuous load while gaming.

 

This will make laptops more noisy and the oppsite of what the engineers want. You'll need bigger and stronger fans to make this possible.

Just look at what Apple does. Prefer 100C over more noisy machines.

 

Ah yes you mean the overpriced and overheating crapbooks.

I don't think that's a feasible idea. What I meant was like a dedicated battery compartment rather than just the exposed cells.

Thats not practical imo. You'd be starving the fans of air and that design only works with axial fans, not the centrifugal fans found in laptops.

Getting more airflow to cool the battery because its being heated up by the system is a band-aid solution. The problem now is the heat from the cpu and gpu may harm the battery so we need to isolate the battery from said heat.

 

The larger laptops also tend to use cylindrical lithium-ion cells which cannot swell since they are in a metal container. Smaller laptos use lithium polymer pouches exclusively.

I still think it is mostly the overcharging aspect and bad chemistry which is the main culprit, considering laptops such as the Dell XPS15 run quite hot, are very popular but the swollen battery cases are fairly rare. Unlike the Razer Stealth laptops which run quite a bit cooler but a large chunk of the users report swollen batteries after just 2 years. The Asus cases in this thread are even worse though, the Zephyrus laptop is in most cases not even 1 year old. How are the case temps of that laptop?

I havent seen any swollen batteries of the RB15 Advanced models yet even though those run fairly hot as well.

 

It sucks though that Alienware didnt continue with the first gen AW15 style thickness laptops. I know they where BGA, but for todays components they had a lot of room which would easily cool components to levels which no todays thinner laptops could do while still being fairly portable.

I make progressive metalcore/djent music

 

This will not make "laptops more noisy". All you need is add extra vents, they do NOT require bigger and stronger fans since you need a very little airflow from such vents (battery doesn't need much cooling). At the very worst you can add extra fan which would operate at very low RPMs (it would be always less noisy than CPU fan) specifically for battery cooling, you can also use the airflow from this fan to cool the hot NVME m.2 SSD.

 

There is already plenty of room for airflow - there is a space between battery and back cover on most laptops, all you need is to make sure the airflow would go over the whole battery surface. You can do that by routing the air from front intakes to rear exhaust fans using "guides" such as plastic raised surfaces on the back cover and on the chassis itself, or strips of foam, similar to what you can see on the attached photo if you will look at the fans (Gigabyte uses these to prevent hot air that went through heatsink from being sucked back into fan since there is always a space between back cover and other components and Gigabyte already uses this space to let airflow also come from middle intake on the back cover):

 

One thing for sure... The engineers won't add in an third fan in thin and flimsy (cost and space). The job has to be done by the Cpu and Gpu fans. If they already struggle remove heat out from nowadays notebooks (and all know they run too hot already), they need to be bigger/stronger. You can't escape from rules of physics.

 

That is not true. The current fans do not "struggle" to remove the heat. They are enough to remove all the heat provided that there is enough heat conductivity between heatsink and the the CPU surface. Issue is, all manufacturers use crappy thermal paste. Fortunately it is easy to fix by users themselves, meaning the users can buy freely available thermal paste and do things like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MSILaptops/comments/8hcqan/msi_gs65_tear_down_and_repaste_w_liquid_metal/
"Received my GS65 today. Stress testing out of the box with AIDA64 results in cores hitting 93C and the fans were going wild, and the GPU hitting about 88C. I was able to under volt -.200 on the CPU Core and -.150 on the Cache. CPU temps didn't go down too much so I decided to re-paste.

Here's a link to my album on imgur:
https://imgur.com/a/qkOip1z

Post re-paste results are 70C average during AIDA64 CPU + FPU test. Max temp is 78C from the very start of the stress test due to the fan hysteresis"

The fans definitely won't "struggle" if you will add a few air intakes on the front of the notebook so a tiny bit of air will go over the surface of the battery. They will actually last longer if there is less air resistance due to increased air intake, especially if you will place the laptop on soft surface like your bed or cover the bottom air intakes with your legs when placing the notebook on your lap. As a bonus, you will cool SSD drives better since there will be some airflow going over them, this is important for NVME drives.

 

And you have tested all notebook models out there? Bold statement. And all laptops overheating mess can be fixed with better thermal paste? Oh'well, I don't know where you get this from.

If you have read about the overheating topic.... Many of the notebook owners have to lift up the rear end of the notebook so the fans can get enoug air. Even then it struggle to cool down their notebooks. And this even with the best thermal paste out there... "Conductonaut".

See also... Our Clevo P870 bottom lid cooling mod


The fans is designed around the cooling. More vents in front/added vents in front = Means better and faster fans to compensate the less cooling capacity for the core components.

------------------------------------------------

A curiosity... The M$ Tragedy

Microsoft Surface Pro 4 catches fire
Published on 10 September 2019 by Günter Born

​

Very unfortunate thing: Just a case has come to my eyes, where a Surface Pro 4 suddenly did not want to charge, then the battery expanded and the device caught fire.

Microsoft's marketing people recently drove a real Surface troll campaign against Apple's MacBooks (see Microsoft trumps Apple MacBooks with the Surface ... ). But in practice, the problem bear sits in Redmond and is called Surface. Since the devices are pop popping up here blog posts about real problems. A perennial problem is the battery problems with the Surfaces. Sometimes the batteries are discharged too fast and Microsoft tries to tinker away with the firmware update. Then, in-line batteries suddenly die an early death​

 

Not all, but most of this can. Especially if the laptops already have plenty of airflow from existing air intakes. And vast majority of them do. Even the Dell ones, which have one of the most restricted air intakes. Here is another example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/d27wz3/repasted_my_new_dell_g7_7590_and_the_results_are/
"So the first thing I did was do a Firestrike score right out of the box on this guy after reinstalling a fresh install of Windows 10. The results are below:

https://imgur.com/a/bRf6ZDe

As you can see the CPU and the GPU were pretty damn close to 100c for most of the run. In fact they both hit 100c when running the test. Play close attention to the far left of the temperature scale... the scale goes all the way up to 100... in fact the CPU and GPU pretty much started close to 100c when starting the test. Also note the Firestrike score is 12,807.

Now here is the same test run after I re-pasted:

https://imgur.com/a/LsJ3plO

Now pay close attention to where the CPU and GPU STARTED from. The darker blue line is the GPU. The CPU started the test right around 70c and the GPU started from around 65c I think. The highest temp that was achieved during the test was 90c and that was for 2-3 seconds and went back down. Most of the test the temps hovered around 75 or so while the other test AVERAGED around 95c. HUGE difference! Also the Firestrike score increased by 654 points from 12,807 to 13,461 without changing anything other than the thermal compound. No overclocking or anything"

Want to see my own experience? Unlike many armchair theorycrafters, I now have Dell G7. And unlike random YouTubers, I am allowed to do a re-paste since this is not a review sample. I posted a screenshot in another thread about 9750h CPU, which for some reason has turned to Alienware-bashing thread. When using stock thermal paste, my temps were reaching 100c in Physics test and CPU was throttling. After repasting, WITHOUT UNDERVOLTING and without doing things like removing the back cover, I got much better results. This is using conventional thermal paste, not using liquid metal:


The point is, there is no "struggle" to remove the heat by fans in this model after repaste. And I can find more links for other models from MSI, Gigabyte, Lenovo, Dell and others, where a repaste with better paste, especially liquid metal one, fixed thermal issues. I still have warranty on this unit so I will not be doing excessive modifications like adding extra holes even for battery cooling but after warranty will expire - I might add some, just for battery and SSD cooling since they have no airflow above them.