Thermal throttling on Laptops

johnwhelan

Well-known member
www.notebookcheck.net has been doing some testing which is quite interesting on Intel CPUs with Iris XE GPU. If you run a test that runs mainly on the CPU it throttles at a particular TDP. On a gaming test one machine performed at 40% of the frame rate expected from an Iris XE, it appears that the TDP throttling occurs as the TDP is shared between the CPU and GPU.

An Iris XE GPU has a 3D score of 2688 which in the ball park of a GeForce GTX 860M by the way.

So it depends on your system's cooling but it looks like you can expect less performance on some laptops than the CPU/GPU might be expected to give on paper.

So for trainz a big tower case with lots of room for cooling probably is best for Trainz performance and a cheap laptop might well perform close to a more expensive one simply because of the TDP throttling the higher end CPUs and GPUs.

Cheerio John
 
Yes, this makes sense. My older i7 5xxx Intel CPU equipped with GTX 860M ASUS gaming laptop never throttles, but yet can run Trainz and a few modern titles fairly well, with ease and no throttling. My suggestion is if trying to run something like TRS22, as an example, on a laptop that is not made for gaming, connect an external GPU to handle the load.
 
www.notebookcheck.net has been doing some testing which is quite interesting on Intel CPUs with Iris XE GPU. If you run a test that runs mainly on the CPU it throttles at a particular TDP. On a gaming test one machine performed at 40% of the frame rate expected from an Iris XE, it appears that the TDP throttling occurs as the TDP is shared between the CPU and GPU.

An Iris XE GPU has a 3D score of 2688 which in the ball park of a GeForce GTX 860M by the way.

So it depends on your system's cooling but it looks like you can expect less performance on some laptops than the CPU/GPU might be expected to give on paper.

So for trainz a big tower case with lots of room for cooling probably is best for Trainz performance and a cheap laptop might well perform close to a more expensive one simply because of the TDP throttling the higher end CPUs and GPUs.

Cheerio John
It stands to reason that throttling would happen as temperatures rise, as the GPU is on the same die as the CPU. An 860M chip is totally separate from the CPU and has its own dedicated memory.
 
Yes, this makes sense. My older i7 5xxx Intel CPU equipped with GTX 860M ASUS gaming laptop never throttles, but yet can run Trainz and a few modern titles fairly well, with ease and no throttling. My suggestion is if trying to run something like TRS22, as an example, on a laptop that is not made for gaming, connect an external GPU to handle the load.
My old Alienware has the dual 980 card in it which was the equivalent to a GTX780 desktop card. I am still able to run TRS-Plus (TRS22 version) on it quite well with some of the sliders down such as graphics detail, shadows, and distance. I have found, though, I can run Plus in a remote desktop session to my desktop with higher sliders and still get decent performance without melting the hardware. There's a mouse-movement issue but it works quite well otherwise.
 
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