I am really close to buying a framework 12th gen (DIY edition) that I am going to put Ubuntu on. I have noticed in a few forum threads that the laptop may not be cooled properly with the lid closed, which is half of how I am going to be using this laptop. My question is, does anyone have any experience with how 12th gen performs with the lid closed (1260P processor)? Is the fan extremely loud? From what I’ve seen the 180 degree hinge blocks outward airflow in clamshell. Is that true?
I have a 1240P, however, I do suggest you tell us more about your setup.
How well is your room ventilated? How warm/cold is it normally?
Do you use a laptop stand that allows for better cooling underneath?
What kind of workload do you plan (transcoding video files the whole day or just use the boost once a day?).
Just from looking at it (I haven’t measured and temps or clearances) the cooler should work just fine with the lid closed. There’s still room to exhaust, but it might be slightly more restricted as the air has to take a right turn down, so the fan might just run a little harder. Taking off the bezel should give the air a slightly easier path out.
@Anachron Yes I should have specified my workload. I am a software engineer who works on pretty much everything. I mainly use my MacBook Pro 16 (m1 max, 32gb) for my work but I also have a custom built desktop that I use with Windows and Ubuntu (Ryzen 5900x, 128gb ram) that I use for heavier stuff and probably still will. My office is well ventilated and my house stays about 68 degrees all year around.
I have been working on a lot of desktop apps lately using flutter so this laptop would be used to build and test those among the rest of my work. That would likely be the heaviest thing it would be doing. I would basically be shifting my desktop to be a server for me to offload heavier build stuff to and using the framework as my primary Linux and windows machine for testing the apps I build.
@Skyler_Thompson honestly that doesn’t really sound like you need a lot of performance, unless the Apps you’re creating/testing are very resource-heavy.
While I can agree with @Nich_Trimble that a closed lid should also allow for ventilation, having it open or removing the bezel should be even better.
I do believe you should be just fine with a closed lid. Especially if you raise your laptop even more with a stand or something alike.
@Anachron Thanks. Yes not a lot of performance. A lot of what I do is web work or scripting. Even when building desktop apps, most of the frameworks (like Flutter) support hot reloading where it only recompiles the classes you’ve changed so it’s not like a full rebuild is required very often in a lot of cases. Anything heavy like the machine learning work I do will always get offloaded to my desktop (becoming a server) due to the NVIDIA GPU.
I can always get a laptop cooling stand with fans if you think that will help? I don’t plan to remove the bezel though because it would look a bit funny to me.
How would it look funny as you want the lid closed
and
the bezel is a pull off magnetic thing that can be connected in a few seconds if you want to open the lid and show it off.
@amoun The bezel off the screen would look funny. I don’t plan to use the laptop closed 100% of the time - just about 50% of the time. If I have to pull off the bezel every time I shut the lid to keep the laptop from overheating, that appears to be a problem with the laptop itself.
However, the fact that it can be disconnected and replaced within a few seconds is really cool and a great perk of this laptop (the modularity, that is).
Well I did a quick test with stress -c 8 on my i5-1240p machine. Apparently the linux kernel scheduler puts 4 threads on the performance cores and 4 on the efficiency cores instead of using hyper threaded cores. And yeah it was able to maintain about 88°C with the lid closed and 83°C with the lid open. Fan is on full blast in both scenarios. Raising the laptop off the desk by about 1cm (put my phone underneath the back of it) seems to help in both cases and lower the temps by about 3°C. The hot air can exhaust below the bezel at the back, if the lid is closed.
Well it reaches 95°C or so after basically a few seconds. But once the fan kicks in full tilt it manages to bring that down. I was doing about 5 minutes of testing so it could heat soak a little bit but the machine was cold before that.
Doing an all core stress -c 16 actually does not show higher temperatures, probably because the Turboboost function keeps the clocks lower. Power draw with 8 and 16 threads should be about the same actually from what I observed.
I think that’s pretty normal. It will have to distribute the same power over more threads so it will likely get to around the same temperature. Two more questions:
How loud does the fan get under full tilt? Probably can’t measure in db but is it abnoxious to you or is it pretty good?
Without running a stress test does it get hot? Basically what does it look like at idle after a few minutes? Also, does the fan run while sitting there idle?
Those are my last questions and I think i’ll have all the info I need. Thank you very much again for your help.
As a note, I think testing on Xboxes has shown that the movement of air due to convection (just hot air rising) is neglible compared to the amount of pressure and movement a fan creates. So orientation won’t really have an impact.
Yeah it is pretty loud. Significantly louder than my Thinkpad P50 with a similar all core stress test. Would not want to listen to it all day. But it is just an “air moving”/windy sound, no whining or other annoying fan noises.
However you could potentially limit the cpu boost speed and reduce this (but also make it slower)… I could do some tests if I find time.
Well I did not keep it closed but 10 minutes after the heating experiment: absolutely silent at around 35°C core temp while charging the battery.
From my experience: Sometimes the fan comes on at lowest speed which is only audible if you listen for it. This happens sometimes when watching 1080p videos with the laptop on my lap and it really is not noticeable to me.
edit: for 2.: This is with Fedora 37 and a reasonably decent tlp configuration. So basically not CPU in “performance” mode but turboboost and everything enabled.
Thanks mcz and everyone else. Seems pretty reasonable to me and i’m sure the only reason it gets slightly warmer when closed is due to the 180 degree hinge. I will not be pushing the system anywhere near a full core load 99% of the time so I think I am good.
Yeah, no problem. Glad I could help. Honestly I was expecting it to be quite a bit worse. Don’t like the design with the screen folding behind the body of this laptop. And no vents on the side… But yeah, it is a thin and light or whatever you call it. With quite a powerful CPU inside… I think my Pentium III desktop computer had the same CPU TDP of 30W.