Optimus and Heating...

[iancor789]

Having fried the GPU in my Dell Inspiron, I'm looking for a "proper" laptop, but on a budget...

Essentially, it will be for the usual email and stuff, but also for Train Simulator 2013 (Yes...) and watching DVDs etc on holiday.

Was looking at the Optimus as it has 2 bays for HDD, and I plan to pop in my existing 450Gb SSD in addition to a 120GB SSD Boot Disk.

However, heat is my concern, having fried a prior one with dedicated AMD GPU. What is the Optimus like on heat - has it got a single heatpipe shared by GPU and CPU, or is it one each? are there one or two cooling fans/radiators? Does it get Hot to the touch?
Spec wise, looking at 8GB RAM, i5 CPU (unless i7 fall in cost soon!), and 15" screen.

What are the collective's thoughts on the heat/power of such a beastie? My alternatives are an micro system, but those are more expensive than a laptop, and when I travel, I'll be without it :-(

 

[Keithg]

I have an optimus4 and the temperatures are good, 40-50C on web browsing and rising to early 70C with hours of heavy gaming so no worries. Just get the improved thermal paste.
The system has a heat pipe for each processor but they share a single fan. There is no point on the laptop that gets hot to the touch, although the exhaust vent does get warm when gaming obviously.

Not sure why you are gettign a 120GB boot drive when you alreagy have a 450GB SSD. Use the existing drive as main and then if needed get a WD caviar blue for a store drive and save a few £££

 

[iancor789]

Thanks Keith...

The 450 is the boot drive in the old dell, which, once I get the old seagate disk back in it and running, will be moved to the new beast. The old dell then becomes the kids plaything (as long as they don't want any serious games, its ok!), so the 450SSD is not instantly available for my new beast :-(

 

[Pagey]

My Optimus IV gets warm when gaming but I wouldn't call it anything to worry about, I'm sure my old Dell Inspiron got hotter. Power-wise though, if you're looking to run on batteries and you set it up correctly she'll run nice and cool and you'll get around 4-5 hours usage out of her, mind that's with doing pretty light work like film watching, browsing and stuff like that.