![]() Still, the lifted and flat results come out at 11% faster than the soft-surface run which is impressive. It’s worth noting that while I did run the benchmark multiple times to heat soak each setup evenly, it is a very short test so is less likely to be affected by thermal throttling. That puts the lifted result 21% ahead by comparison, which is a pretty big swing.Ĭyberpunk shows a much closer result from lifted and flat, functionally identical actually, with only the blanket dropping performance. However, running on a soft surface cuts that performance by 50 FPS. In CSGO the stand nets around 25 FPS more than running on the desk, or just shy of 6% faster. Ok, that’s great, but what about gaming? Well here’s the fun thing, it’s the same story. But, on a longer render like the Gooseberry scene, when the CPU ends up outputting more heat than the heatsink can soak up, the performance starts to suffer. This thermal mass is what slows those temperature shifts down, and is also why on shorter workloads like Cinebench, and to some extent the BMW scene in Blender, even when suffocated by a blanket, the laptop had little difficulty performing to its best. The sponge can hold a certain amount of water, and if you are just drip-feeding it water it’ll just soak it up until it gets too full and will start shedding some of the excess. That process takes time, and equally at low temperature differentials – ie the ambient air isn’t much hotter than the metal of the heatsink – the heat will often just stay in the metal, rather than exit into the air. In general, heatsinks don’t just immediately wick every joule of heat away, it gets transferred from the CPU or GPU into the plate, then into a heatpipe, then out into the heatsink fins, then finally into the air the fan is forcing though. That’s crazy – and I think is the key to the issue here. For reference, the stand result is 17.5% faster than the blanket run. The open-air approach from the stand nets just shy of 30 seconds off the “conventional” desk result, and the soft-surface run is nearly 100 seconds further back. But the real kicker, that’s the Gooseberry scene. The desk and stand results are the same at just over two minutes, with the blanket run around 5% down, or about 7 seconds slower. Looking at Blender and the BMW scene though, now we start to see a difference. That’s strange as I would have thought that having literally no space to draw air in would hurt the performance! The blanket only knocks around 1% off of the lifted result, and the desk vs stand numbers are within a percent too. ![]() So, how does a machine like this fair with miles of space up on a stand, versus the few millimetres of its feet, versus smothered by a blanket? Let’s take a look! I’ll start with the CPU results, where surprisingly, at least in Cinebench R23 multi-threaded, there really isn’t much difference. Either way, the amount of ground clearance the laptop has determines how much air it can draw in – too little space and the fans won’t be able to draw enough air in to blast out over the heatsinks. In both the F1 car and laptop’s case, you actually don’t want them to be completely flat to the surface – in F1 you do want minimal ground clearance whereas the laptop is happy with anything above its minimum. ![]() See much like the 2022 F1 cars, the amount of ground clearance they have plays a huge role in how the aerodynamics work. This works pretty well – except when it doesn’t. Most gaming laptops use the same sort of configuration – dual fans that draw relatively cool air in from the bottom and eject it out the sides (including towards the display). Gaming laptops are power hungry beasts – they can be kicking out 200 or 300 watts of heat from insanely slim chassis, and since their performance is dependent on how cool they are, they need to eject that heat somehow. Have you ever wondered how much more performance you could be getting from your gaming laptop if you used a laptop stand instead of resting on a desk – or worse a soft surface like your bed, lap or sofa? I have, and since I have what I think is the prime candidate to test with this, the Asus Zephyrus M16, and a laptop stand, let’s take a look! ![]()
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