Any reason NOT to buy the most-souped-up 13 AMD? Upside of lower tiers?

AFAIK all modern laptop CPUs are limited by thermals. So if by “throttles” you mean that it clocks up to the turbo frequency, then quickly (seconds) clocks down so as to keep below 100 Celsius, getting to around the nominal 35W power draw, then I believe you can’t buy a laptop today that doesn’t do at least that.

But you shouldn’t see disabled cores or vector units, or frequencies dramatically lower than the base. (According to Notebookcheck and other reviewers, on the AMD Framework you shouldn’t see noticeable performance degradation on the scale of minutes, either, while other laptops do suffer from this to a varying extent.) So if you are seeing something dramatic—there have been some reports of bad thermal paste on the forum, maybe that’s your problem?

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