Comment on Ideas for how to repurpose a half broken laptop
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months agoP1 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.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 8 months ago
What you are saying in the first paragraph seems more about cooling capacity rather than the computer taking more power than the power supply can handle. I might have misunderstood, but that’s what I don’t see happening with the charging brick. It does happen with the usb-c hub that’s integrated on the monitor. It barely even keeps the battery with normal work, while my previous x13 (integrated graphics) had no issues regardless of task.
I don’t know the power in idle, I can’t install anything, not sure if I can check. If you know a way let me know and I’ll try.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Ok, I’ve never heard about that. I might run some form of stress test just to see better.
Portable software worked in the past, but I don’t want IT calling me… A third time.