This way, when I buy the integrated version, I know the chassis has been designed with the heavier airflow of the discrete-GPU version in mind. If I'm lucky, my integrated-GPU config might even use the identical size heat-sinks as the discrete-GPU version.
You can buy them from the manufacturer with no discrete graphics cards.
I have one with a card which is physically turned off for the same trick.
If you go to dell.com and select one of the more entry level varients you can customise more things:
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9ohpyo/psa_t470t4...
Note that to this day it's magnitudes of order cheaper to build a desktop for crunching numbers. There's no beating the thermals of that, and thermals = cost either in money or time in this very physically-underpinned market.
Why can't laptop engineers just find a way to break physics, it's not that hard, Einstein did it...
edit: /s
If that was the gamble, you'd assume that the laptops would thermal throttle way below the physical Tjunction limit. As a matter of fact, they're still allowing themselves to reach very high temperatures even in common usage, despite an undersized (hence, to some extent, less reliable) cooling solution. That's kinda hard to explain as a sensible choice.
I ran my 2011 MBP hot and it eventually bricked. The logic board "post-recall" also eventually bricked too.
The Apple support thread for that issue ran hundreds of pages, so the 44 page thread for the 16" MBP is just giving me bad flashbacks.
This doesn't have to be a bad path. Most peoples' CPU use is intermittent, and there's a decent amount of thermal mass around. I'd rather be able to go fast for 5 seconds and then be throttled to speed X by ability to move heat than to be throttled to speed X all the time.
Is Apple ignoring this? Or just assuming these workloads are short/bursty enough to not worry about sustained utilization?
Seems like that wasn't working fully, since they report having GPU issues after stress testing the computer (external GPU worked fine). And that is worrying. Is the thermal stress shutdown from OS, or onboard the GPU/CPU?
I worry that it might actually be a software issue. GPU clock starts running slowly, software assumes that it will be running faster, two commands are issued but only one is processed, driver gets confused, driver crashes.
Well, they did make the 16" a fair bit thicker than the previous models.
Whenever I see a laptop with a >15W TDP CPU in a super slim package with a tiny heatsink/fan unit, no matter if it's from Apple or another vendor, I'm very suspicious. At least the 12 inch Macbook from a few years ago which was truly fanless uses an appropriately low powered CPU.
disclaimer: used to do systems engineering for a server manufacturer a long time ago, after you've gone through a dozen iterations of ways to mount skived copper heatsinks on dual socket motherboards in 1U cases, with various fan solutions, you realize that everything that is not acoustically terrible is some sort of compromise. People are trying to put CPU+GPU+RAM packages that are anywhere from 25W to 45W TDP in laptops that are physically too small for them.