New Z w/3.06 CPU! No-no!:(

I am in Shanghai and went to demo a new Vaio Z at a local SonyStyle store with a 3.06GHz CPU and Dual SSDs raided. The unit had Vista 64bit and 8GB of RAM... surprisingly though, no BluRay just a DVD Burner... go figure...

I tried to have someone explain to me if the design of the Z was changed because on my Z (model VGG-Z27GN) internally there is only space for one 2.5" drive (and nothing else really). If the new Z's can accommodate 2 HDs inside, some major internal redesign had to be made. Does anyone know if this is the case or if maybe Sony is using some sort of two 1.8" Drives instead that they RAID together?

Because I am foreigner and no one speaks English at the store I was basically left alone. I had with me a USB pen with EVEREST on it. I decided to run some benchmark tests.

The overall benchmarks on the 3.06GHz CPU where really good and on par with what they should be, BUT I found a MAJOR catch!!! It all goes well within the first 30 to 45 seconds and then BOOOMMMM, major thermal throttling kick in! The unit was plugged-in and the store very well vented (the AC actually a bit cold).

Within 15 seconds the fan starts spinning like a turbojet engine and about 15seconds after that, the Vaio goes from 3.056.1GHz to 2129.1GHz, then fast down to 1596.2GHz and it just stayed there till the application was closed. It took then (just) 10 seconds for the speed to go up again to 3.056.1GHz and another approximately 90 seconds before the fan started slowing down.

So, basically, a 3.06GHz processor will run for 30 seconds at full speed and then down to performing at ½ speed from then on. Wow! In other words the cooling design on the Z does not support properly so much heat. Maybe this unit specifically had a problem but to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.

They had 2 other Zs on display one with a 2.80GHz CPU and one with a 2.53GHz but I had no opportunity to test those. Id like to go back and do it just out of curiosity actually.

 

Yes it uses two 1.8" SSDs. the first Z models were already capable of this.

 

the cooling system in Z is not very good.
with nvidia 9300 + that processor, i cant imagine the temp its gonna produce. let alone running just nvidia with lower spec cpu (P8** class) is already heat up almost 100c.

thanks for the information

 

I doubt we really need so fast CPU in this baby? I think a super duper fast SSD RAID 0 will be better performance boost, than just CPU, oh and yes...some super fast DDR3 8G too

 

Please do so... one of the reasons why I picked the 2.53Ghz model. And I will most likely undervoltage the cpu...

 

Depends on what applications you run. But for 90% of the people you're right.

 

Ahhh! Thanks for the info, that makes sense. Smart design

 

Indeed, the cooling system seems underdimensioned. I have a mere P9500, but when I'm doing CPU-based work, I have to switch to Intel graphics, else the CPU will throttle due to heat, and the job go much slower.
And if I run "heavy" 3D graphics with the nVidia card for more than a few minutes, the top left area of the keyboard becomes too hot to touch.

A couple of times, my Z has even crashed under heavy CPU+HD load, but after I discovered the workaround of switching to Intel first, this hasn't happened.

Simply put, the air flow out of the Z is too low, so doing things like switching the thermal paste or using an external laptop cooler won't help -- there's not enough CFM air flow to move the heat out of the cage, and it accumulates.

What probably would help a little is a grille mod. The plastic grille covers about half the exhaust area, while a better designed metal grille should block far less. Preferably combined with a few filtered holes drilled on the bottom right, to decrease the underpressure and improve the overall air flow.

 

The cooling doesn't seem to be very effective. Yet it makes a lot of noise.

 

I will try to go Monday mornign to test the other 2 units. Even the 2.53GHz CPU is of the same family and thermal spec as the 3.06GHz but I imagine it should run a bit cooler. As for speed, it all depends on the applications running. For many 3.06GHz is an overkill, for me for example its not enough. In the same token I run XP 32bit so 8Gb of RAM is useless while for other users, its a blessing. My only point here, aside from how much is too much, is that a machine should be advertised and configured to run at 3.06GHz and then due to thermal dissipation design, make the CPU run at 1/2 speed.

Given, the Z is incredibly thin and beautifully put together but still, if I pay for 3.06GHz then , that's what I want to got, not just for 30 seconds before the whole thing is about to start melting down

Its OK, I venture to say this happens on MANY other laptops not just the Sonys ... Like, all the new UMPC's running Atom CPUs at 1.60GHz and 2.0GHz and XP or Vista?... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm... right... if they run for 10 seconds at full speed it will be a miracle

 

What happened to testing new products before release?

 

Well, the noise is because the fan (and the blades) are very small... the larger the fan the lower the noise... and really, the Sony people didnt have too many choices in order to make the laptop so thin... maybe next-gen i7 mobile CPUs coming in a couple months will run a bit cooler

 

Yeah... really Im sure they did They just never disclaim for how long a laptop can actually run at the CPU's maximum speed

 

Actually it's not that thin in my opinion. I owned a Z540 with P8400.

I also owned a SZ680. It did not seem to be much thicker. Yet it was much more quiet.

As much as I respect the Sony engineers, I don't think they did a good job with the fan, a laptop with P8400/P8600 should be totally quiet on idle in my opinion.

 

In order to achieve full speed of the 3.06GHz CPU, you'll need to adjust the power management settings: by default it's set to balance mode, not performance mode (the settings are in vaio control center, not vista power management)

 

Thats the first thing I did of course. Its set to maximum performance/always on.

 

I agree with you on the fan matter. A better design with more effective heatpipe and/or a large fan (even if thinnner) would have provided better cooling with much lower noise. I still think the Z is a very nice design and overall a nice laptop. When it was first conceived it was meant for 25W CPUs. I think eventually they'll redesign the inner works for a next-gen model and make it better. I still feel as far as design goes in the world of PCs, Sony laptops are still by far the most well put together... also, the most expensive by a large margin. This said, published specs should be the real thing and it should not be too much of an effort to properly keep the 3.06GHz cool enough to keep it running faster than 1/2 throttle

 

I am assuming you did not block the exhaust vent which is blowing hot air out like crazy, but are you sure you did not block the air inlet that sucks cold air into the laptop? Also, was the display stand made of glass or has cloth covering? And last but not the least, like someone has already mentioned, nVidia chip generates tons of heat even in idle, switching to Intel chip may make a big difference.

 

- Exhaust vent on the left side not blocked (tons of super hot air coming out & screaming fan noise)
- Air inlet not blocked (there is actually not a specific air inlet on the Z except the vent covering the SODIMMs)
- Laptop on glass stand (with extended battery on it that give sit an extra inch of space and air flow)
- Laptop on Stamina/Intel Mode (tried both Stamina/Intel and Speed/Nvidia actually with exactely the same results)
- Duh... its OK

 

No, grill mod is not going to do anything. The airflow out is not limited by the exhaust area -- not till you have sonic speed exit velocity and choke the flow, which is more common in jet engines than in notebooks. The fan can easily kick more flow out -- it will be louder, but it's easily doable.

The problem is to get the heat from chip into air and there are only two ways to do it -- increase contact area or lower the air temperature.

Sony is doing the first one already in Z's heat sink assembly for 35W CPUs. If you have seen pictures of the heat sink assembly comparison by falang, you will notice the 35W assembly has many more "spike bushes" to increase the contact area. Maybe not enough, but that's how you want to tackle the problem.

To lower the air temperature, what you really need is to reduce the temperature of the air going into the laptop -- you can be in a 60 degree room but if the surface you put your laptop on is 100 degree, the air going into your laptop is still 100 degree. And this is how those notebook cooler work, by making sure the air going in -- most of the laptops have that inlet on the bottom, including Z -- the laptop is cool.

I think in your case, a notebook cooler will work wonders for you.

 

Well, there is a secondary inlet to the left of the battery charging light -- I think it's opening for one of the wireless antennas. You can block that one and give a noticeable heat increase.

Also, you want to try your test on a metal or wood surface, not glass, even when you have extended battery that lift the bottom surface up.

 

very interesting thread - something i hadn't known. Maxing the cpu for ~5min the temps got to 85 and seemed to mostly stable. This is on a 690 with a p9600. Might open it up to see if i have a heatsink rated at 25 or 35w (should be a 25 from everything ive read but would be nice to have a 35).

Those that have seen this problem - your temps have to be hitting ~100c for it to scale back right?

 

I believe these new Z units are already based on the Centrino 2 refresh just before the new Calpella is introduced in a few months. I would therefore expect all these new Zs should already have the new 35W rated heatsink instead of the 25W on previous models. I know in Japan the higher-end Zs have had the 35W heatsink for a while but not most of the models shipped to other parts of Asia and the US. The only way to check if these new Vaios have the new heatsink in them would be to take one apart, but, I am assuming so as previously they used 25W rated CPUs and now they are using 35W.

The main problem of the design of the Z is basically not enough air flow. Independently of how much better a heatsink is, if it is trapped inside a casing and no air circulates properly, it will not be effective because the extra hot air has nowhere to go. The main air inlet on the Vaio is from the grill covering the RAM. This is where the first problems starts. RAM gets extremely hot so the air going inside the laptop is already not fresh but already heated up by the RAM itself.

There is indeed a secondary inlet to the left of the battery charging light. But that one is too small to allow any real air in and guess what? Its just above where the har drive sits! Its purpose is actually to cool down the HD a bit. Again, whatever air is sucked in that eventually moves towards the CPU's assembly is also already heated up. On my Z I have a Solidata X1 SSD and its gets melting hot during normal operation (much hotter than my previous Mtron 7000… which by the way performed better on most scenarios)

Finally, inside the laptop you have one common heatpipe design that removes heat from both the CPU and the NVidia Chip. That air is then sucked out by a ridiculously small fan, that makes more noise than it generates proper air flow.

There is a film on the grill inside that protects against dust that can be removed. This might help a bit though more dust will collect inside the Z. Also using a laptop cooler can help. But I think in the end, nothing will be enough to cool down the CPU at full load for extended periods of time. For that, Sony needed to re-engineer the air flow design inside the Z starting with a larger fan and another large (cool) air inlet.

We should all be fair and not expect that a small 13" screen laptop such as the Z can ever cool its inner parts as well as a Clevo/Sager 17" 13lbs mammoth with a 130W core i7 desktop CPU in it and more fans and air inlets than the AC at my house

The only thing here is that, for the price (very expensive) and Sony's reputation (very high), a premium laptop like the Z with a rated CPU in it NEEDS to perform as advertised and as the consumer paid for. If its not possible to cool the CPU down, then Sony should not put that processor in, or, change the cooling, or change the advertising.

I'm not here bashing Sony, I like their products and I am sure that this thermal throttling issue might actually happen with more machines than we can imagine from other brands as well. The thing is, Sony happens to be among the most expensive computers on the market and because of that, I would like to see just a little bit more effort from their part in quality control and engineering, and less in nice brochures and marketing hype, that’s all.

 

So there are no air vents grills at the front of the notebook? Not having any on the back is not great.
The 35W Sony Z fan is actually pretty normal in size and is about the same size as the fan that was used in the SZ6-7.
The copper pipe is also a normal size on the 35w model. It is though noticeably smaller on the 25w model. The 25w cooling system is not really good enough.




http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/pcuser/articles/0807/22/news071_3.html




Where the CPU is placed in the centre of the notebook means you will hear the fan more compared to where it say was positioned in the SZ range.
I do think that Sony need to work at the cooling but I also think that right now that they might be limited a bit what they can do also as this is a 13.1 3.3lbs quite powerful notebook. What ultimately controls the fans as well is not hardware.
Some people are ok with the fans though and some not. There is room for improvement though definitely.

 

If the exhaust had been due to air pressure, the above would have been correct. However, with the itty bitty fan that the Z has, it isn't the pressure differential that is at work (except at micro-scales), but air is shoved or propelled towards the exhaust, much like a hand fan. The moving air is at a lower pressure itself (due to moving, see Bernouilli et al.), and not at a noticeable higher pressure than the air outside. So when it hits an impediment, it tends to stop, cause nothing draws it outside. You need a much stronger fan to get a well working pressure differential on the exhaust.

That only does something if that air subsequently is removed -- if it's allowed to stay in the case, it only buys you time before overheating.

Cooler air in only helps noticeably if there is enough air flow out, so that the hot air inside the machine actually is replaced with colder air than before. The problem with the Z is that it can't get rid of air fast enough, and the heat accumulates inside. The problem isn't making the components bleed more heat to the air that is inside, because that air heats quicker than it can be removed from the case.

In my case, the investigation into the airflow started because a notebook cooler had absolutely no effect.

 

Well, the 35W heat sink assembly is not a replacement part for 25W heat sink assembly -- it goes with a laptop shipped with 35W CPU and if you buy a 25W CPU Sony has no reason to give you a 35W heat sink assembly to go with a 25W CPU. We can argue that Sony probably should give everyone a 35W heat sink -- I am all for it --, but Sony has been shipping 35W with 35W and 25W with 25W since day 1 when Z went on sale (remember Japan always has the 35W option) and it is still this way today.

As far as the thermal design of Z, I am not saying it's perfect or there is no room for improvement, but I think there are a couple of misconceptions here and testing a laptop thermal design on a glass surface like VeEuzUKY did is simply not a good test -- there is a reason that almost all good thermos cup use silver-coated glass as the inside liner to hold the vacuum. Other than having fabric actually covering the vent, glass is the worst common material you can have under-neath a laptop. The heat builds up very quickly with very slow conduction to other part of the glass, so it just keep heating up the air above it -- the air your laptop desperately need to cool its internal.

One can argue that if it could only last 30 seconds before throttle down on a glass surface, do you expect it to last 30 minutes before throttle down on a wood surface? No, probably not, but I don't know it till I test it -- and I wouldn't jump on too many conclusions till I do. I know VeEuzUKY has limited surface options in a SonyStyle store, but at least understand that this is not a good way to test it and your results are skewed toward a worst-case scenario.

Now, I don't want to spend time unpaid lecturing on the intricacy of aerodynamics and heat transfer, and I know you probably are not interested to listen, but just don't over-analyze something you have no idea on like the size of the vent and where they are located. Yes, the air coming in will pick up heat from whatever components they touch, but no, they don't pick up as much as you think -- the bottom case share the heat through conduction as well (one reason why Macbook always hot as hell on the bottom) and that's why having a cool wood surface under your bottom case is very, very important when you have air inlet on the bottom.

And for the last time, the size of the vent, inlet or exit, doesn't matter, they don't control the flow, the fan does. You double the inlet vent area and still keeping the same fan, you get negligible benefit on cooling. I use my Z on bed with the bottom completely blocked and that secondary is enough to keep my Z cool -- obviously I don't do benchmark there, but it is enough to watch Hulu without heat build-up.

In the end, can Z use a better design? Sure, I would love one myself. But is the one in there really such a wimp? I am not sure -- I haven't seen one test done by people who actually know how to properly use the current thermal design yet.

 

Actually, I tried the test runs on the laptop on glass and also on its docking station. If these are "bad" tests NOTHING else will be better, because a laptop on your lap, cloth, couch, wood table or anywhere else people "actually" use it will not make cooling any better. Yes, I could try to stick one inside a refrigerator and bench it For sure that would be more forgiving test and yield better results but real world usage of this laptop makes testing on a glass table in a showroom OVERCOOLED by a cranked down A/C and with an extended battery on it that raises the unit an extra 1 inch off the table, actually an extremely fair test and not skewed toward a worst-case scenario… IMO of course

 

Not sure if I understand. If you get a Z from Japan, you always get 35W heatsink? Otherwise, 25W CPU gets 25W heatsink and 35W CPU gets 35W, right?

So would it be better to get 35W CPU (P8700 for instance?) than 25W (T9600)?

 

hum... I have the P9600 and haven't seen the CPU gets so hot that the thermo control kicks in... I watch HD movies using the Z on my bed all the time... The bottom vent is always covered...

It only gets somewhat hot to touch when I play unreal 3.

Maybe the cooling system could use a new design, but the current one certainly is not a wimp. My friend's thinkpads and Dells freeze all the time due to overheating when left running on bed. The Z doesn't, and that makes me happy.

 

Sigh, another self-taught aerodynamist. Flow doesn't go from low pressure to high pressure unless pumped. And when you are pumping, well, you are playing with pressure to get the flow. Exit area is not a limiting feature to the flow in this case, pure and simple. I am not saying doubling the area is a bad thing, but it is a rather ineffective knob to play with.

True, but we know the air is being removed.

You make it sounds like the CPU touches a conveyer belt of air with a heat transfer coefficient of infinity. In that case, you would have been absolutely right. Unfortunately, it's not. Heat goes from metal/silicon to metal than to air and the transfer coefficient from metal to air depends highly on the temperature of air it touches. You can easily achieve better cooling by having cooler air at the same amout of hotter air. At the end of the day, quantity (flow) and quality (temperature) both matter, assuming same metal to air area.

That is interesting. From the few cases I have heard, the cooler all helped in the temperature. I can see why you get the conclusion on not enough air being removed -- and again you would be right if we have a system of a conveyer belt of air and a CPU with infinity heat transfer coefficient. In reality, with little information on what you have and what others have tested, I am still more inclined to believe the bottleneck to be in the metal to air as Sony has done -- if the bottleneck is overall flow out of the laptop, they won't need the extra contact area in the 35W heat assembly.

 

No, regardless where you get it, you buy 35W CPU (the T series, not P) you get 35W heat sink. If you buy 25W CPU, you get 25W heat sink.

 

By reversing that logic, you can also tape up half the existing exhaust hole with negligible detriment. Try it, then run something CPU/GPU intensive, and see what happens.

Or, to put it another way, you can breathe just fine with one clogged nostril. But try to run with your mouth closed, and you'll soon wish you could breathe through both.

FWIW, I reduced the max temperature in my Lian-Li tower case by more than 5 degrees C by dremelling off the grilles in front of the exhaust fans. (Not that I recommend that if you have children, pets or careless people around.)

 

Dude, I am just trying to help you and everyone else to get the best out of your laptop, no need to sound like I am attacking you and be all defensive there.

Glass surface makes a lot of differece, seriously, that's why I played game on my wooden desk instead of my glass coffee table. I like to play game on my coffee table more than desk, hell, I like to have my computer running full steam inside my backpack on battery with no ventillation what-so-ever so I can get work done even when I commute, but is that a fair requirement for the designer?

This laptop is designed first and foremost for business and most business have cubicles or desks made of wood instead of glass. That is where you would most likely put the full potential of the laptop to the test and that is where any good designer to optimize for. Sure, people use their laptop on whatever surface, but you are doing a specific benchmark to emulate a situation where you need maximum CPU power, and how many of us do that in couch or in bed? Come on, I can easily put my Z inside a backpack and I am sure it will throttle down probably before it even finishes loading Windows. Is that a good test to indicate Z has a bad thermal design?

All I as is not for a forgiving test -- although it will be more forgiving --, but a more realistic environment where people will use this laptop with full power so that the information to be more useful for anyone buying or using Z. Your results tell us we don't want to use full CPU/GPU on coffee table, great, but I learned that long ago to be true for any laptop with bottom vent, what I care is what to expect if I use it on a desk.

 

Actually I have to say the Z is kind of an very peculiar laptop. On my Z (VGN-Z27GN) I covered with tape the bottom grill that vents the RAM, the side inlet that sucks air in to the HD compartment and the 2 speaker openings on the top. The air flow coming out from the exhaust fan is the same and the laptop doesnt run any hotter! I wonder where all the air is actually going in from... maybe we are all missing something. Openings/no openings, there is not less hot air coming out of the laptop nor does the fan run any faster or slower

 

I use a tempered glass chopping board under my notebook and have for months, the cooler the air that is being sucked into the notebook the less time the fans stay on, and it only cost me £1.99 from a household store.

 

regarding the notebook cooler, its actually does help in dissipate heat from Z.
i was benchmarking the notebook with The Last Remnant, and with table fan direct to the notebook, and lowest speed (i forgot to turn on full speed on my cm infinite), i get the temp running around 85 ~ 91, instead stay at 95c most of time.

and also, the alumninium surface on your keyboard also helps dissipate the heat. make sure you didnt cover (e.g: keyboard protector) while running the Z at full blast with nvidia on. its does help Z turn cooler, as the bottomside (carbon fibre) doesnt help much in dissipate heat, sadly.

 

While we are reversing the logic, why don't we just push it to the limit by completely blocking the exhaust vent and see how much temperature increase? Come on, we are talking about going one way to reduce the temperature and changing the area has diminished return because it is not the limiting feature. For a proper design, it is much easier to just re-size the fan capability that fighting for real estate in the exhaust area. For our own after-market mod, I think you want to get that 35W heat sink assembly and see how well it works. Sony could easily use a different fan if they find that flow out of the laptop to be the root cause, but they didn't change the fan going from 25W to 35W CPU, nor the exhaust area.

As for grilles mode, doesn't Artic Silver typcially do the same amount of temperature reduction? And I am assuming that you tried taking the whole tower case off (one nice feature about desktop ) and it did not yield satisfactory results?

 

aha, my dream Z would be:

A 35W heatsink with the upcoming 25W P9800 installed, applying Arctic Silver 5 or whatever better;

Upgraded graphics card - maybe ATI 4570,4530,4330 or whatever cooler than the nVidia 9300M GS;

8GB RAM of course;

raid 0 SSD with 2 x upcoming Intel X18-M 320G = 640G;

BIOS hacked to enable VT.

 

LOL. also backlit keyboard, and less plastic on the hinge.

Do the ATI cards really run cooler than the 9300? I haven't seen any laptop with switchable graphics use ATI cards. Is there a reason behind this?

 

Jparity, this is off topic but can U give us feedback using the Z between your experiences of using Vista and 7? is Windows & really any better or faster? U'd think its faster than XP? Thanks!

 

seem good. someone even benchmark the overclock card and the temp still around 70 and below. but thats in FW.
i think the heat will still there even using ATI card if its in Z as we all know Z have very poor cooling system. An Acer with 9300m gs have temp around 60 ~ 70 running peak from one user in my Gaming thread before..

 

I've got a Z26GN with the P8600 CPU (2.4GHz), and that by the way is not the quietest fan that I have heard on a lappie. Especially when the performance and fan kicks into higher gear, it gets pretty loud. Really curious how loud the 3.06 cpu will get when it does go into full speed.

The last time I checked (at a room temperature of about 29'C), I got about 90'C for the GPU temperature, which I was quite surprised about. But then, that is the temp when I was running CAD and doing heavy duty rendering. My CPU, if I remember correctly, was at 60'C. That was with a P8600.

The 'down-throttling' issue is noticable for me only when the Z is running off the battery. Probably automatic to get the mobo to conserve battery, but it does take a few seconds for the Z to bring up the speed again when I want it to render some models (on battery power). On AC, the CPU seems to stay at a constant speed (I don't notice any lags like I do while on battery)

I guess the T9900 (which I think was the 3.06GHz C2D being mentioned here) just uses completely different cooling protocals, which again, I guess is to keep the temperature in check - you don't get such high-spec CPUs in most dual-core (Intel E series CPUs) desktops these days, so it is understandable that the T9900 won't stay at full throttle permanently. But then, staying at that speed for a few seconds only, despite (I am quite sure I read this somewhere on a Japanese Sony site) the fact the mobo has gone a design revamp to compensate for the extra heat. It seems that the design engineers didn't fully suceed... That is quite disappointing. I would have been happy with it staying at 2.6GHz for idle, max for about 5 minutes, and lower than 2.6 for running on battery only...

 

Tomorrow morning I will go the the SonyStyle store again here in Shanghai and test another unit, they have several... maybe I tested one with a bad internal CPU/cooling assembly. Its not unusual a unit might not have a perfect contact between CPU and heatpipe during assembly and therefore not have proper cooling performance... I have had this happen before on laptop I owned years ago that always overheated (HP). I opened it up removed the copper cooler, made sure it was flat on the cpu, put new thermal compound and fixed the overheating probem for good by re-assembling things nicely. But that was a really easy laptop to take appart. The Z is a nightmare. I opened my Z before to upgrade the CPU and put an SSD on it. WIll never do it again. Very difficult. I will go check and also try the 2.80GHz and 2.53GHz versions and see what the numbers yield.

 

I may be wrong but don't the Lenovo Thinkpad T400 & T500 have ATI switchable graphics (or what they call hybrid graphics)?

 

So, all is well and good, but what to buy (from Japan)?

Should I go for 2.66Ghz, which is 35W and get a 35W heatsink or for a faster 2.8Ghz which is 28W (hmm... which heatsing will this get? 35W?), but also has 6MB cache.

I do intend to run some CPU intensive stuff and play few games (mostly RTS, like Empire: Total War which are CPU heavy).

So, in short, in the light of this discussion, is there any difference between P8800 and P9700?

 

Um, you missed the air intake on the front left?

To the guy that believes the Z is being fed air from the bottom: it isn't, at least not much. The "grille" over the RAM is cosmetic more than anything. Take a few pieces of down from a pillow and see where they stick.

 

The P9700 is faster, cooler, and more expensive. Only you can answer whether the price difference is worth it.

As for your game hopes, crush them now. The Z is NOT a machine capable of playing games like Empire: Total War at any workable frame rate. While it barely qualifies for the minimum requirements, the 9300GS-M card is far from fast.
Older games like Civilization 4 are playable, though, if you can live with 3D cut scenes becoming a slideshow.

 

The grill on the left is for air to get out. I think the intake is partly through the keyboard, partly through the memory compartment. Here's an idea for dangerous experiment: cover keyboard with a cloth and see if temperature rises

 

No, no, not the exhaust port on the left. The FRONT left intake port. The underside of the front "lip" of the keyboard tray has slits on the left, which is the main air intake for the machine. They're hard to spot until iyou know where they are, but once you've found them, you can't miss them.

 

Ah, I see Hard to spot indeed. But I still maintain that part of the intake is through keyboard too.

This intake under the front "lip" is ingenious though.