Notebooks – CS5 – thermal issues

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Bob,

Whenever I buy a notebook, I run a little app called “Coredamage”. What this does is basically push CPUs to the max for as long as you leave it on. I leave the laptop on a table for a full 24 hours. On top of that you can download a copy of speedfan and core temp to check max temperatures.

If it’s still fine the next day, I’d say it’s unlikely it will fail with CS5. Of course, hot weather can make a difference.

As a PC guy, I would absolutely recommend a Macbook Pro over anything else on the market for laptops. Having very little configuration options, Apple is able to test for temp issues much more carefully than say HP…

By the way we lost 3 HP machines months apart with the same issue due to solder melting on the integrated Nvidia card after less than a couple of years (of course out of warranty) so you can’t test enough.

Obvious design flaw, but HP would hear nothing of it. That’s $9000 worth of gear! At least you know what laptop brand to stay away from…

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Jon Barrie]

Hi Vince,

I have to chimne in here and state that I have both PC and Macbook pro laptops. The Macbook pro can get rediculously hot and when running win7 via bootcamp and then in OSX (yes I have Master collection across both platforms) got so hot it froze in the middle of a live feed capture via OnLocation and I had to recapture the tape later which blew out the very tight budget for this client.

Personally I wouldn’t recommend apple gear as being any better than PC. In fact my ASUS PC laptop has never crashed/frozen like my 15″ unibody MBP which has not got enough ventilation IMHO. (there is no fan!).

My rule of thumb is treat a laptop as a laptop not a proper work station they shouldn’t be used as a replacement. Be aware of heat, but get something that suits your needs as fast as you can afford and with a 7200rpm internal drive, but don’t look at anything less than a Gaming Laptop, as they are stressed to the hilt for gaming. I know NLE is a different type of stress, but anything that is not gaming is not stressed in any capacity near the gaming.

The problem with using the stress application (which i used something similar when overclocking older desktops) is that you have purchased the machine in order to install it and run it. Unless there is some thing technically wrong with the laptop the retailer will not accept a return. And the manufacturer won’t touch you either.

AMD chipsets are also another issue in themselves. My experience with them is that they run HOT. that was what separated them to the intel chipeset and made them a popular choice for servers they can technically still run hotter before the OS or BIOS knocks them out. If they are running so hot and the space they are in is not temperature contolled (ie: hot summers day no air con then it could get so hot in laptop that may have slightly confined space for ventilation, fan, suction that the internal heat could melt the soldering. That said I only use Intel chipset desktops and laptops and recommend it that way to those that ask me.

I don’t’ mean to be disrespectful in any way Vince just that I thought another cow leader should forward some experience that suggests a slightly different perspective.

I think everyone should stop trying to find a CS5 workstation laptop and just wait until the technology is officially supported in that format and let it go. So hard as we are so close to having the power in a back pack, but we aren’t quite there yet.

– Jon Barrie 🙂

Jon Barrie
aJBprods
http://www.jonbarrie.net
http://www.suiteskills.com

[Vince Becquiot]

Hey Jon,

My beef is with HP laptops right now as you can imagine:-)

I also agree on the AMD chips. On top of that, the chip being cheaper than Intel’s, manufacturers tend to use it in all their bottom of the rack machines and they get a bad rap in the process.

I can’t swear on the MBP for all things, but our 17″ i7 is running pretty cool (relatively speaking) on CS5 renders. It does have a fan, unlike some of the previous versions. Apple is also much more likely to fix things in store when they go down, unlike some (uhmmm) other maufacturers that take your machine on an 30 days world tour.

Unfortunately, there are days when we just can’t drag that 80 pound steel Coolermaster case to the job so the laptops have to take the heat… I’m still a PC guy when it comes to desktop, but I guess I got burned to many times on the laptops showing up full of adware crap with no Windows DVD and dying within a year after warranty.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Bob Kiger]

Thanks to Vince and Jon for their varied personal accounts. In either case it’s fair to say that thermal issues are but one of the problems faced by professionals who operate in the field.

At Videography Lab our most minimal mobile HD production/editing is carried on a touring bicycle, but for most productions we use our mobile unit . . . VanGo 🙂

It is equipped with solar panels feeding 2 – 12 volt [100amp hours each] gel cell solar batts. We use a small 800 watt inverter to power our existing ASUS Quad core and small peripherals. One big advantage of the notebooks is they are designed to handle power interruptions. We are open to larger and higher quality inverters with the move to CS5 because we will need to add an external eSATA drive box. Any suggestions?

The shock of traveling on unimproved roads challenges all form factors but more so I believe the small powerhouse units like today’s “offering” by Shuttle Computers https://us.shuttle.com/J3_5800G.aspx Note: We see this as yet another Chinese press release “order in advance” scheme. We have been tracking a similar press release scheme since last summer at this thread https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/3/894680

These “tailor made” platforms keep popping up and than disappearing or morphing during the purchase phase. In our case we did not receive our ASUS notebook until 3 months after we paid. If history has taught us anything, it is that the digital marketplace is extremely dynamic. Everything from OSs to video cards and application versions change [usually expanding the need for resources] during a protracted purchase phase that is built into “press release schemes”. They often include hidden “gotchas” in the specs. In the case of the Shuttle J3-5800, imagine putting all that power under the hood and limiting the output to USB 2.0 when USB 3.0 is already available?

We have decided to stay the course & install CS5 on our ASUS Quad Core notebook and spend summer immersed at Lynda.com and Adobe TV learning how to manage the CS5 collection.

Right now I am concerned that Adobe’s gamble on “Flash for all” may not yield because of the monster case that Google and Apple are putting forward on the overhead of websites built with Flash as opposed to HTML5. Any suggestions on where would we go to discuss that issue?

Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com

[Vince Becquiot]

Hi Bob,

Your situation seems quite more demanding than most.

When on the go, we also have an CPU inside a rackmount case. This case is mounted inside a spring loaded road case and on wheels. Hard drives usually take the biggest hit on the road, and during loading / unloading. We also have a case holding 2 deep cycle batteries in parallel and a modified sine wave 700w inverter. I think the whole thing cost us about $600.00, most of it going to the inverter, but it works very well. We added a simple analogue voltmeter on the side for monitor. This also goes through an APC b/u unit before getting the CPU.

[Bob Kiger] “Right now I am concerned that Adobe’s gamble on “Flash for all” may not yield because of the monster case that Google and Apple are putting forward on the overhead of websites built with Flash as opposed to HTML5. “

Apple’s success on that front mostly rests on the iPad at the moment, although they are already half way there. I don’t really have much of a concern, Adobe will adapt when needed. Mp4 quickly becoming the format of choice for encoding, it will be fairly easy to convert over a format that viewer can access. Now if your entire site is built on Flash, you may have some long nights ahead of you.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Andrew Clark]

Have you tried the Dell M6500 series or even the Sager laptops?

[Bob Kiger]

At Videography Lab we are using a combination of inductive and deductive approaches to deal with thermal issues. We don’t have to test every high powered notebook to know that there is a functional problem regards the thermal issue with all notebook designs [thusfar]. Hit https://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359101/sony-warns-half-a-million-vaio-laptops-could-overheat
to see just one manufacturers dilemma.

Our thermal design team has developed a “Nanocube” notebook cooling device that will cool them all down. One at the time of course.

Waiting to get my hot sweaty old hands on it. 🙂
Bob

Bob Kiger seminal author of “videography” [OCT1972-AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER]
http://www.videographyblog.com