How many of you have fried your laptop with computer chess?

[smatovic]

I am aware that there are gamer and workstation laptops in the market, but I
doubt that common latops are suited for running pro computer chess in the long-
term.

So, how many of you have fried your laptop with computer chess?

I wracked one CPU fan in my Lenovo T61 with ZetaDva development, but was able
to replace it with a spare part for 25,- euro, since then I run test suites
and tournaments only on my workstation or a rented server in the cloud.

--
Srdja

[pkumar]

Code: Select all

So, how many of you have fried your laptop with computer chess?

I did, but only the HDD with OS.
Probably the exit vent was clogged as the laptop was not cleaned for a long time.
The laptop now runs with linux on pendrive.

[mar]

I fried my fan as well (still works but sound is weird) - will never again use a laptop for testing

[Modern Times]

I agree, a normal laptop is just not meant to be run for long periods of time at high CPU usage. The manufacturers would never say that, but it is the reality. Those tiny fans run at very high RPM and wear out fairly quickly as a result.

If your laptop or tablet is passively cooled, and I'm thinking of some Apples, you may say great, no worries for me then, but if there is no fan taking away that heat then you need to be very sure that it is being dissipated out of the case somehow. Of course passively cooled CPUs probably throttle which again kind of makes them unsuitable for chess testing.

[Jouni]

I tried Stockfish benchmark with my brother brandnew laptop. With all threads running it became very noisy and benchmark never finished at all! But Pohl seems to run laptops 24/7 always.

[algerbrex]

I can tell even though my current laptop is a huge upgrade over my old one, I'm still starting to run the fan out. So I'm in a bit of a bind with further testing and improvement on Blunder, as this is my primary laptop for school work as well, so I can't risk frying it.

In the coming weeks, I'll need to look into investing in a decent testing framework, enough cores, and threads. I'll either build this myself, which I'm leaning towards, or purchase this in the form of a desktop. In the meantime, I'll either put Blunder's development on hold, or move all testing to my old laptop, which I've already run pretty hard, and might as well get my money's worth from it.

The only other option I'd look at I suppose are dedicated cooling fans, in the form of a pad or whatnot.

Chess programming is a very fun hobby, but it'd be perfect if it wasn't so CPU intensive!