Phantasy Star Cave Message Board

Ok. This is quite a wild throw but I'll post this anyways...

I happen to live with two cats and one dog.
All the things I buy I try to choose the passive cooled ones.
With laptops, it's quite impossible.
I would like to know if any of you know if there's fanless laptops in the market at the moment. I'd rather have bigger laptop than just mini laptop.
What I've found is "Nec VersaPro VS-7". It's basically closest to what I'm looking for. But I'd like it to be bit bigger. Then there's Nokia Booklet, which I could accept if there was more RAM.
Now I have 17" laptop with two slots for hard drives. Two (HD) slotted, fanless laptop with RAM expansion at least to 4GB would be the best.
Why I need two slots for HDs is because I like to keep my system on SSD and media on HDD. But I belive that's too much asked if I'm looking for fanless laptop. :(

So... If anyone has followed the laptop markets tell your advice/opinion.

Wow... I can't help. I didn't even know fanless laptops existed!

How do they lower their processors' temperature? A gigantic heatsink?

Low power consumption processors and heatsinks, it seems...

WING-0 wrote:Wow... I can't help. I didn't even know fanless laptops existed!

How do they lower their processors' temperature? A gigantic heatsink?

Afaik Nokia Booklet spreads its CPU's heat to its aluminium body.

BTW. My server is my older laptop and it is possible to set it to passive cooling mode. When the temperature raises enough the processor cuts its power (thus lowering its raw calculation power).

To be precise cooling that way is actually "active cooling" since the CPU is doing an action to keep itself cool. And in "passive cooling" CPU doesn't do anything when the temperature raises, unless it gets VERY hot it turns the "active cooling" on. Most CPUs only know their own temperature and turn the cooling mode depending on that temperature. Without fan CPU gets hot very quickly and it has two choices: a) turn "active cooling" on b) issue an emergency shutdown.
On most laptops fans blow all the time. But I'd rather have one that has the capability of entering "active cooling" == turn fan(s) off when lid is closed.

Then there's this problem: How to know which laptop has this "active cooling" feature? My Acer Aspire doesn't have that feature.

Because it seems that it's quite hard to find a laptop that has no fans I'm trying find one that has the feature to turn fan(s) off.

D'oh!
It was just the other way around. Active cooling is just what you would normally think of - cooling with fan. And passive is cooling with no moving parts and CPU clock speed regulation and/or CPU throttling.
It was somewhere else where these modes were upside down.

I found out more: Sony X11S1E. It seems to be fanless. It also has Carbon fiber body that makes its price high.
My problem is that I cannot find any proper review of it.

I used to undervolt my laptop because I thought heat was the source of my shutdowns. This lowered my running temperature at full processor load by over 20 degrees Celsius. It also cut my power usage in half.

So I finally bought a new laptop.
I didn't find any good fanless laptops so I decided to buy a small laptop which runs on some other processor than Intel Atom.
I chose Acer Aspire 1810TZ.

Here's some sort of system statistic created by inxi:

Code: Select all

System:    Host Mieu Kernel 2.6.36-ARCH x86_64 (64 bit) Distro Arch Linux
CPU:       Dual core Intel U4100 (-MCP-) cache 2048 KB flags (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 ssse3) bmips 5188.86
           Clock Speeds: (1) 1200.00 MHz (2) 1200.00 MHz
Graphics:  Card Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller X.Org 1.9.2 Res: 1366x768@60.0hz
           GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Mobile Intel GM45 Express Chipset GEM 20100330 DEVELOPMENT  GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.9 Direct Rendering Yes
Audio:     Card Intel 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller driver HDA Intel BusID: 00:1b.0
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.23
Network:   Card-1 Atheros AR8131 Gigabit Ethernet driver atl1c v: 1.0.1.0-NAPI at port 2000 BusID: 01:00.0
           Card-2 Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 driver iwlagn v: in-tree: BusID: 02:00.0
Disks:     HDD Total Size: 320.1GB (6.0% used) 1: /dev/sda Hitachi_HTS54503 320.1GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 47G used: 4.3G (10%) fs: ext4 ID:/boot size: 122M used: 16M (14%) fs: ext2
           ID:/var size: 29G used: 6.1G (22%) fs: jfs ID:/home size: 207G used: 6.2G (4%) fs: ext4
           ID:swap-1 size: 2.05GB used: 0.05GB (3%) fs: swap
Info:      Processes 158 Uptime 9 days Memory 989.4/3864.1MB Runlevel 3 Client Shell inxi 1.4.23


I cannot but recommend this if you're going after small but powerful laptop.
On a side note I bought this as used from Acer. This was a DOA laptop. Wireless wasn't working when customer received this. At the service they gave this customer a new laptop and later replaced the wlan card for this laptop.
Then I bought this with price of 315€. ;) The laptop came only with the laptop itself plus the power source.
Oh. and the battery... It really lasts long, unless you're compiling some big software etc...

Cool stuff.

So it didn't come with a windows disk? I know my laptop doesn't require the disk to reformat but I have one anyway. Hopefully yours can as well.

Neo48 wrote:Cool stuff.

So it didn't come with a windows disk? I know my laptop doesn't require the disk to reformat but I have one anyway. Hopefully yours can as well.

Actually there was Windows 7 preinstalled, but I never actually booted into it.
I installed Arch Linux from USB stick as my first act. Partitioning the hard drive as the first step of the installion formatted the drive.
I have sometimes made an exact copy of the Windows installer partition for later use. But that "later use" has never come. I haven't had any use for windows since this millenium started.

ohhh right, you are a linux guy. Well then, you are good to go