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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

> My understanding is that managing heat is >still< the ultimate factor limiting performance

It seems fitting that I'm hearing the fans spin up to full blast on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop supercomputer as I compile some code in an Ubuntu VM while starting up a CPU-hungry Point Of Sale system in a Windows VM, and reading your comment on the Windows host OS.

It is nice that I can step away from the computer and just listen for the fans to quiet down again to tell when everything is ready to go.

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Well, at least it's Thinkpad X1E...

We had much less going on when we joked that you know who is compiling or running any sort of serious work in the office by hearing whose MBP was whining hard with its fans.

Ah yes, these fans may get loud, but they are nothing like an office back in the day full of hackers on ASR-33 Teletypes!

Each one had a noisy keyboard and a noisy printer. The keyboard didn't have a nice click like a modern keyboard, more of a loud scrunchy sound. The printer was even louder and rang a bell if you had a line too long.

You could always tell when the mainframe crashed. Everyone's Teletype printer stopped all at once, and everyone started mashing down every key on their keyboard out of frustration.

Everything that is thin and light is going suffer from heat earlier than a bigger laptop.

Game laptops or workstation laptops are better solution(s) but the best is getting a desktop. I'm not joking and I'm aware of taking a device with you everywhere.

Are you monitoring temperatures on it?

Not specifically, but the top of the keyboard does get warm when all this is going on. Do you or anyone have any recommendations for temperature monitoring software for a ThinkPad running Windows with various other OSes in VMs?

In any case I think the POS software may be the main culprit, as it normally runs on a standalone machine and wasn't designed for power savings. I did set the Windows VM it runs in to "Power saver" but it doesn't seem to have helped much.

(Sorry if this is off topic for the thread!)

SpeedFan? https://almico.com/speedfan.php

Have you activated VT-x VT-d etc in the bios?

If not prepare for a performance boost, and a quiet Fan ;)

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, "Intel Virtualization Technology" and "Intel VT-d Feature" are both enabled by default in the BIOS (in fact it doesn't let you turn them off).

Ah ok, i have seen some bios's where both are deactivated plus hyper-threading too :)

NotebookFanControl is the only one that works on newer machines in my experience.

https://github.com/hirschmann/nbfc

I'm asking because I'm wondering how often it hits 99 degrees and throttles. And if it doesn't, I really need to take a closer look at it, because that would be incredible.

Dell and HP machines have this problem, 6 core Intel processors run slower than 4 core ones because the former always throttle (even though the TDP is supposedly the same).

If you want, you can use Throttlestop to set better controls/limits on clocks and power (and possibly undervolt it) for better performance, battery life and temperatures.

I'm using ArgusMonitor for this: https://www.argusmonitor.com

I don't have a thinkpad, but I like OpenHardwareMonitor for my computers: https://openhardwaremonitor.org/

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