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> "battery life" vs "Optimized for intensive computing usage"

These are contradicting conditions. (Unless maybe on an M1?)

If you do use the CPU then battery life will drop even for the best laptops to a few hours max, while the fans will spin like crazy emulating a helicopter taking off. All the above mentioned laptops will behave like that.

At my last place I had a Thinkpad P1 which is supposedly for the above mentioned purpose, and still I suffered from heating and noise, and the battery life was abysmal (2 hours of Zoom call would deplete it, for example).

Although I just noticed that you didn't mention portability - in which case buy an older Thinkpad T4xx/5xx which had the dual battery setup, and buy some additional batteries too, and you can swap them on the fly. Sadly AFAIK Lenovo no longer makes these laptops...

Battery life tips: 1. get the simplest screen (FHD instead of 4K, 90Hz...). 2. don't get an integrated 3D card.




Yeah, it’s an unfortunate reality with your bog standard x86 laptop. Choose performance or portability, silence, and battery life, but not both.

And sometimes even when you pick your trade-off, it still doesn’t work out. See my Thinkpad X1 Nano I selected as a silent ultraportable with decent battery life — it spins its fan up to surpassingly loud levels when plugging in a 2560x1440 60hz display or whenever it’s doing anything even remotely strenuous. If my needs for that machine didn’t include Windows, I would have been so much better served by an M1 MacBook Air it’s not even funny (and even then, I sometimes wonder if a bodge of Windows on ARM in a VM on an M1 Air wouldn’t work better).


> Battery life tips: 1. get the simplest screen (FHD instead of 4K, 90Hz...). 2. don't get an integrated 3D card.

This sounds counter-intuitive. I thought integrated graphics used less power than a discrete amd/nvidia card.


Yes, I can only imagine the parent made a very unfortunate choice of wording, meaning "integrated" as in "integrated into the laptop," and "3d card" as "discrete graphics card." You definitely want A graphics card for battery life (not that you can buy a laptop without one) and you want it to be one integrated into the CPU.




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