What is your long term experience with a High Wattage Quad Core laptop?

[GreaseMonkey255]

I've started this discussion to find out if I'm just shying away from a bad experience, or if my bad experience is reality for most people.

I've owned one HP laptop bought in 2012. 2 months after the 1 year warranty expired, the fan broke. It was making this awful grinding sound. I bought a new fan and some Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease to replace the fan. Everything went well, until the Arctic Silver grease dried out 6 months later and needed to be replaced. The same was true 6 months after that. The moment that the grease dried out, the core temperature skyrocketed, so the computer was unusable. I bought Arctic Cooling (not the same brand) MX-2 grease to replace the Arctic Silver grease, and everything seemed to be fine. Then I got the bright idea to upgrade my processor from a 35W dual-core AMD A6-4400M to a 35W quad-core A10-4600M. This rendered the Arctic MX-2 grease unstable and the temperature fluxed constantly. To this day, I cannot find a substantial thermal grease for the machine and the core temperature does not fall below 60 degrees Celsius and usually fluxes around 95 degrees Celsius.

Since then, I have only bought laptops with 15W Intel Core U (ultra-low voltage) processors. I've looked into the higher power core variants: the 45W Intel Core HQ processors, but I've hesitated to buy a laptop with those processors. My question is, did a lot of you have an experience like mine, or am I just a victim of the "pendulum effect" of decision making?

 

[xandros9]

I don't know specifically but I can certainly say a high-performance laptop isn't inherently troublesome.

I do know that my sister (and later I) was burned (pun not intended) by HP's poor thermal design in their laptops in the late 2000's. I don't know whether they've improved but I'm not confident. (and the fact that some of their laptops have had an always-on fan as well as a fan failure on your part that soon doesn't exercise my confidence.)

But yea, that issue can possibly be accentuated by a higher power processor but I think it reflects more on the individual model then higher-TDP chips as a whole.

I can definitely say I've had a laptop with a TDP of 25W kept in varying degrees of service since 2012 without issue (I'm also the second owner so who knows what it was up to for the first few years of its life) so you can absolutely go higher, just chose the PC around it somewhat wisely.