A 15" laptop recommendation for front end engineers (as of 07/2020)
Most laptops that provide decent performance (and can use 64 GB RAM) are just too damn noisy. I have recently found one that isn’t.
It should be noted that it does require you to “mess around a bit” with either tools I wrote (for both Windows and Linux! 🎉) or use modified DLLs to get around manufacturer restrictions. If it wasn’t for that, I would’ve returned even my top pick in this list.
I’ll describe all machines I’ve tried out in the past weeks and what I learned from all this in case you happen to be considering one of my rejects, are curious about boutique laptop retailers or maybe you could benefit from the more general things I figured out.
Why specifically front end engineers?
See the section Even today, multi-core performance appears to be less important than one might assume near the end of this article. (It might actually be a good choice for full stack and other engineers too. I only know that it might not be as good as other options for compiling the Linux kernel. 😉)
Ranking
- Gigabyte Aorus 15G (with i7–10875H)
- PC Specialist Recoil IV
- XMG Apex 15 (tested with 3950X but a cheaper CPU probably would’ve yielded similar results)
- Asus TUF A15 👎
Aside from Cinebench and measuring power consumption, I compared building and running jest on grafana (details about testing methodology towards the end of this article).
I recently tried out these laptops and thought I should share my findings so that others who have similar requirements to go through such hassles. Especially given that reviews don’t do much good, as a fair share of them seem misleading.
First, with all the hype around AMD 4000 mobile CPUs, I assumed that they would provide amazing performance and was quite frustrated that none of those machines support 64 GB RAM. Well, let me straighten that one out:
Asus TUF A15 DOES support 64 GB RAM!
(That doesn’t mean that I recommend it.)
I have no clue why they officially state that 32 GB is the maximum but one important thing I have learned on this journey is that at least the laptop divisions of these companies don’t appear to be particularly competent. From not knowing their own hardware to shoddy software, I ran into all sorts of problems. Which is why if a machine doesn’t work as you want it to within the first week or so, I’d recommend to just return it (if you’re able to where you live) and not trying to work things out with customer support.
Benchmarks
I originally didn’t plan on writing an article, so there are holes in the chart but I think it still shows a bunch of interesting things. For a personal baseline, there’s also my previous HP ProBook 450 G5 with a i5–8250U:
These raw numbers aside…
1. Gigabyte Aorus 15G (with i7–10875H)
Pros
- Best performance.
- By far the most customizable, especially regarding fans.
- Can be made essentially inaudible (although I don’t guarantee it, due to possible manufacturing variances) with a bit of effort. (See below this list of pros & cons)
- Huge battery.
- A precalibrated display with ~100% sRGB gamut coverage. (Despite being Pantone-verified, I’m not sure about the quality of them though. Someone with a freshly calibrated colorimeter would have to verify. See comments below for details. But for non-artists: Don’t worry about it, this still means that it looks awesome.)
- Somewhat alright numpad layout.
- Included webcam cover.
- Shows which keys to press to enter BIOS during booting. (That’s pretty rare and I keep forgetting, so I think it’s noteworthy.)
- Has fairly chunky rubber feet that mean that it can usually easily get air through the bottom.
Neutral
- CPU temperature safeguards. It seems to throttle around 90 degrees, I’ve only seen it go to 92 here and there. T-junction according to Intel is 100 degrees.
- When dual-booting Windows and Linux, fan settings applied in Windows are retained.
- Fantastic clicky mechanical keyboard. Feels great but some people might find it too noisy.
Cons
- Whiniest fan I’ve ever heard in a laptop. 🙉 (Which stops at lower speeds than what is possible as-shipped. Hence the fixes below being a requirement in my opinion.)
- Fan adjusts in steps instead of smoothly.
- 12 screws to open the bottom. (+ prying tool needed)
- Quite limited number of BIOS options (except security settings) compared to e.g. an HP Probook. For example no WakeOnAnything (except RTC).
Comments
If you read this, you’re probably an engineer. And as such, I’d recommend investing a bit of time in checking out the following tools to make the Aorus 15G inaudible. Even with fan speeds set to 15% (out of the box, the minimum for custom adjustments is 25%), as I’m writing this and listening to music via YouTube, the CPU temperature is just fine at 50–55 degrees. (Around 40 at idle.)
If you think that doing the tweaks is too much of a hassle, I’d strongly recommend to just use the ECO power profile and the fixed 25% fan speed setting in the Gigabyte Control Center. (Of course you’ll want to switch to some dynamic fan profile if you ever run a game on the machine.)
Anyway, this is the fan control tool (+ a few extras) I created that works on both Linux and Windows and comes with defaults for mostly quiet work (Yet powerful! Power limit during boost is still high and so if you do something intense for more than a few seconds, fans will still ramp up. But during light use or brief boost spikes, it’s basically inaudible.):
The reason for why I came up with it is that there’s also the following solution with modified DLLs for the Control Center but after using them for a while, my Control Center stopped starting. Which is not too big of an issue because power/color profiles still get applied on startup and I use my own fan control anyway but still… not ideal: https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/h0zpfg/aero_15_deep_fan_controlcenter_fix/
There’s also this GUI-based tool for Windows here, about which some people have said that it also works with Aorus 15G, since it’s quite similar to the Aero but… I guess I clicked on a wrong radio button and now it keeps crashing right after I start it:
Note that even with max fans, the initial boost will make the temperatures go up to 90 (when stress testing), so I’d recommend not to worry too much about that. And after the 28 seconds of boost, it’ll sit at ~80 degrees even with max. fans. ~85 with 50% fans.
As a non-fan noise sidenote, I’d also advise trying out the included color profile for 5800K in Gigabyte’s Control Center. Because at least on my machine, verified with my i1 display pro, that is in fact the closest one to 6500K and offers an average delta E of ~1.5 for grays and ~1.6 for primaries and secondaries. Then again, maybe my i1 display pro hasn’t aged well — it’s about 10 years old by now.
2. PC Specialist Recoil IV
Pros
- Undervolting possible. (Note the first con though!)
- Huge battery.
- Relatively quiet (fan sound was considerably higher in frequency than that of the Apex 15, yet quite a bit less whistly than the A15 and a lot less whistly than the Aorus).
- Decent performance/power consumption ratio.
- Actually has a caps lock indicator.
- Aside from the things mentioned in the cons, great customer support. Usually polite, fast to respond and eager to help out, which mostly can’t be said for the well-known big laptop companies. (Also offering dead pixel warranty and free pickup — how awesome is that?)
Neutral
- Flawed mechanical keyboard. E.g. the space bar seemed to rub against something and the huge key caps generally didn’t make for a great typing experience in my opinion.
Cons
- Stopped booting after ~1 hour of testing. Maybe it was because of the 50 mV undervolt I set in the BIOS. But 50 mV isn’t exactly a lot. And there was no way to recover — reset procedures involving unplugging the CMOS battery didn’t help.
- I looked up the TongFang barebones laptop this is based on and that supports 64 GB RAM, yet it says 32 GB in their shop.
- One has to ask support for tools and drivers, otherwise one has to rely on what comes preinstalled or a fresh OS detects automatically. The control center is essential though because of power profiles and fan settings.
- No hardware docs to speak of, so one has to either already know or assume or ask support for every little thing. Which e.g. can’t even provide info about RAM compatibility.
- Upon returning the device, I was asked to provide my Windows password. (I had of course already wiped the drive…)
- Limited fan settings — can only be adjusted with the Office power profile and the curve itself can only be adjusted in a very limited manner. That said, with the curve tweaked as low as possible, it still cools well and is very quiet most of the time.
- Bad numpad layout.
Comments
There aren’t many entries for it in the benchmarks chart for a reason. See the first con…
3. XMG Apex 15
Pros
- Great cooling solution. No whine whatsoever and low fan speeds would be (see cons) sufficient to cool at reasonable power profiles and loads.
- Great customer support. Like the customer support of all manufacturers not particularly tech-savvy (instead of accepting my criticism about the way they use tracking services breaking their online shop, I was asked to order in a browser without ad blockers “because JavaScript is required”) but by far the fastest and most friendly and accommodating.
- Only 5 screws to open the bottom.
- Somewhat alright numpad layout.
Neutral
- Obsidian Fan Control (which has issues with licensing — can’t recommend buying it) can be used to freely configure fans.
- High power consumption and only a 62 Wh battery. (I count this as neutral because it’s an obvious caveat that anyone who buys it is aware of and accepts.)
- One can use the Tuxedo Control Center in Linux. But it offers very little customizability unless you maybe fork it and modify the fan curves that seem partly hard-coded in there.
Cons
- Limited fan profile customization — 20% min. for CPU fan, 40% min. for GPU fan. This is what makes it less viable as a powerful yet quiet machine than the Aorus and Recoil.
- Power customization doesn’t work as well as advertised. (It was promised that one can freely tweak the power profiles through Ryzen Master or ZenStates. Ryzen Master doesn’t work properly, ZenStates not at all.)
- A Windows update broke the Control Center. Suddenly, I got a pop up on every boot saying that I need to choose an app to open “clevofnkey” with and I couldn’t switch between power profiles any more.
Comments
If the software wasn’t as bad as it is and the customization had worked as advertised, my hunt might’ve been over a lot quicker, since this was the first device I tried. It seemed so promising.
Which is why I’m very grateful that it wasn’t like that. The Aorus with my fan fix is much less of a compromise than this would’ve been.
4. Asus TUF A15
Pros
- 3200 Mhz RAM included
- Function keys are arranged in blocks and reasonable numpad layout and cursor location.
Neutral
- Because of it the way the air intake is designed (there are plenty of articles and videos about that), its performance isn’t influenced by it sitting flat on a desk or having a cooling pad.
Cons
- Worst performance in terms of building and unit tests by quite a margin.
- Not as whiny as the Aorus but still pretty annoying.
- No separate fan control, only 3 power profiles with different fan profiles.
- Very aggressive fan profiles. Temperatures barely go above 70 degrees on “Silent” and fans frequently turn on and off during light use — more annoying than if they would run at a constant slow speed.
- Armory Crate is required to switch between power profiles and the installation procedure is ridiculous. 3 different installers, one of them has to be used through the Windows Store.
- The performance of the included drive is terrible. I wouldn’t run an OS or even applications off of that.
- Low quality network jack, had to slightly force the plug.
- Forces Windows 10 Home during installation. (One can modify the installation medium to circumvent that though.)
- Wasn’t able to handle 2 simultaneous Windows 10 installations. One simply stopped being able to boot.
- Froze while running an installer. (The only time this happened with any of these machines.)
- 11 screws to open the bottom. (+ prying tool needed)
- Bad display in terms of gamut.
Comments
Unless you have a really good reason, just stay away. Asus customer service appears to be horrible too. Many people have complained about the way Armory Crate is distributed, yet no change. And before ordering, I read that this machine throttles severely when on battery, disregarding the chosen power profile. I asked Asus whether they plan on changing this. After days, their response was a generic “We thank you for your concern…” — useless.
Testing Methodology
I ran yarn build and yarn jest — all (gotta remove a conflicting npm script first though) at SHA 3b383149db7408b1669159ad2edad9c141498ece of grafana until the results were within +/- 1 sec. Because the first 1–3 runs were always slower.
Power consumption is the full system, measured at the wall. (Trying to measure idle consumption that way was probably partly a mistake and I maybe should’ve done that unplugged and using some battery monitoring tool, since at least Aorus and TUF kept fluctuating between 0 and presumably top-up spikes when plugged in. Although there obviously are machines that never even go to 0 when plugged in and fully charged, so… there’s that.)
🌡Ambient temperature: 27 degrees.
Learnings & Closing Words
Even today, multi-core performance appears to be less important than one might assume
This probably actually affects even more people than just front end engineers but I’m not sure how many projects are as big and utilize all threads during compilation as well as e.g. the Linux kernel (and I suppose artists who frequently render 3D scenes or videos). But typical front end tools like webpack, TypeScript and of course IDEs and browsers definitely only use a few threads that they may not even fully utilize and so the single core behavior obviously (see benchmarks) becomes more important. It also helps with other everyday workloads, as PCMark10 demonstrated (I don’t have a chart for this but the Aorus beat the TUF handsomly in all areas except video rendering, where presumably, the integrated graphics were used and Vega was simply faster than Intel UHD).
CPUs get less hot during multi-core workloads
I’ve never tried it on desktop but at least on these laptops, I saw that the CPUs simply don’t clock as high during such workloads and the work is obviously shared. Running jest (which will use all threads 100% — and given that, I don’t understand why it is slower on the TUF than the Aorus, even though it’s faster in Cinebench multi-core) doesn’t raise CPU temperature by nearly as much as building. And so if you tweak your power and fan profile to be able to handle sustained few-thread workloads (e.g. by running prime95 Small FFTs with only 2 threads), any sustained multi-core workload should be fine too.
Ryzen 4800H and i7–10875H are surprisingly similar
… if their performance is put in relation to the power consumption. Also their power consumption in general. Based on professional laptop reviews, I wouldn’t have known. For some reason, they rarely make this connection and if they do, they only use the CPU package power reported by hwinfo. Which for one thing has been known to not be reliable (Not hwinfo’s fault — see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10b8CS7wQcM ) and for another — when it comes to laptops, why bother isolating the CPU power consumption? Unlike with desktops, it’s not like people might use vastly different configurations that might consume vastly different power.
Alternatives (low-TDP CPUs)
Strictly looking at performance per watt (which is obviously theoretically key for good performance at low noise), it might actually even make sense to aim for the possibly more efficient 4800U (or 4900U when it finally lands) or i7–10710U (or 10810U — which also isn’t around yet). But good luck if you need 64 GB RAM. Even 32 can be tough to find with laptops that use low-TDP CPUs. And of course it’s a gamble whether the included fan profiles will be satisfactory (if Gigabyte releases a machine with such a CPU at some point — they seem to have used the same Control Center, so maybe the same mods would work…). And will manufacturers put in decent cooling solutions or will they use the low TDP of CPUs to save on cost and just go “Ah, as long as we only hit 50 dB, it’s good enough…”?
Finally…
While this process took a long time, it is incredibly satisfying to go a whole day of work with the machine being inaudible probably around 97% of the time. Which I don’t think is an exaggeration — a few seconds here and there when starting up the webpack dev server or doing something costly in the IDE but mostly, there’s just… silence.
