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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Just know that higher RPM doesn’t necessarily mean higher noise. In my experience Helium filled drives can be pretty quiet, and basically all really high capacity drives are helium filled.

    I have an arm of shucked WD drives and while I can hear them from time to time, they’re not bad. Also your case makes a huge difference. Make sure the drives are on rubber isolators, and what they’re mounted on can’t vibrate to make any noise. The only noise I hear from these drives is when they first spin up after being idled.








  • The power draw is being limited, but not because the CPU or GPU are running too hot (they’ll be in the mid 80s or even 70s). It’s when the power delivery parts (inside the laptop) get too hot to keep up and it can’t keep up. You can override those with programs like throttlestop, but the battery will drop MUCH quicker. When it’s hot the PL1 and PL2 drop to about 25 watts which is basically unusable on 11th gen i9, but it easily has the head room for 45-55 watts. GPU is largely unaffected which is weird. I’ve seen it get limited to around 60 watts, but the 3080 mobile below 80 watts is also awful.

    For monitoring power usage I use hwinfo 64 in windows, I’m not sure if the portable version would work.


  • P1 gen 4 with the i9 and rtx 3080. Pay close attention to the power levels under heavy load. It will drop massively under long term heavy loads to try to prevent the battery from discharging. My machine only takes in a little over 170 watts from the power supply, but with a laptop cooling pad it can easily sustain over that 170 watt mark. It doesn’t happen instantly, it starts when the laptop is fully heat soaked (takes 30+ minutes with the cooling pad). You won’t notice it until about an hour or two in, but once it starts it will start accelerating as the battery heats up. Shorter loads that the laptop is more designed for it handles it just fine. It’s only when you push it for too long and too hard.

    Also whats the power consumption of the mobile 4090 like sitting on but idle? Random programs trigger my 3080 for no reason and that GPU draws about 20 watts minimum. I want to upgrade, but I’d lose vram if I got anything less than the 4090 and I don’t know if I want all of that excess power draw when the system can barely benefit from it, and it makes using it as a laptop awful.




  • It even happens with power efficient devices. All Macbooks will run at their lowest clock speed with a dead/low battery (even my M1), My Thinkpad T14 with an ULV CPU and it’s odd. It tries to limit total system power to around 25 watts, even though I have a 100 watt power supply connected. My theory is that since 30 watts is the lowest power supply it will run off of it’s trying to keep that 5 watt buffer. Unfortunately that means my CPU runs at 800mhz doing anything but idling. Laptops with dGPUs often just wont work at all, or are so far limited they’re unusable.

    Some older laptops like my Thinkpad X220 will run at 800mhz on a 65 watt charger, but on a 90 watt charger it will run at full speed. But unfortunately in the days of USB C that makes things a lot more difficult.


  • Power consumption. Especially with turbo boost power consumption can easily spike well above what the power brick can deliver, so the battery is used like a capacitor. Or shit even without the spikes chargers can’t keep up. My laptop will actually discharge under full load with the full 240 watt charger.

    It’s not normally an issue on REALLY low end devices (sub core i, like pentiums or atoms), but anything high end will reduce it’s power consumption without a batter installed.







  • If you don’t need a lot of GPU horsepower besides the AI stuff then you could just use the integrated graphics and have a dedicated GPU for the AI stuff.

    Having multiple GPUs in your system isn’t really that special. Plug HDMI into GPU1 to make GPU1 drive your display/play games. Plug HDMI into GPU2 to have GPU2 do stuff. If you’re doing AI work then you don’t need anything connected to the GPU, the program just needs to know it’s there and to use it.

    The only thing to look out for when using the iGPU and a dGPU is that the bios doesn’t turn off the iGPU if it detects the dGPU. If you have 2 dGPUs then it shouldn’t matter outside of maybe the bios wanting to use the first one.