Comment by dangus

I think the term “throttling” has done some poisoning of the way we discuss laptops. It’s like a derogatory word that implies instability or something like that.

I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”

Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.

Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.

I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.

This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”

Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.