[Eug-lug] testing laptop cooler effectiveness.

[Ben Barrett]

IANAGE (gentoo expert), but AFAIK many laptops are not designed to
handle 100% system load.
Compiling software comes close -- and compilation (and linking, etc)
has a lot of small steps, so
it is not *completely* balls-to-the-wall.  There are other tools which
can keep keep respective components (cpu, disk, memory, bus, etc) at
known levels, controllably.
Folding and mprime are common way to bump CPU :)

You might want to consider burn-in & system-testing software, as well
as benchmarking stuff.
The CPU will be the biggest heat dissipator in a laptop, I'm pretty
sure, but a misdesigned hard
drive heatsink could compound the issue, as could even other
components like graphics,
network, sound, and so forth.  It would be fun to see full-on tests on all I/O,
including card readers, USB/1394, wifi&BT, and docking bay, just to
see what happens...

ben


On 3/26/07, Jim K <kjim9 at clearwire.net> wrote:
> I came across the subject of testing laptop coolers recently. I have a
> question for those who have done gentoo installs.
> Would install gentoo linux from source code be a good test of the
> effectiveness of a laptop cooler? This I assume should only be done when
> the test system can be attended throughout the install. Whether correct
> or not, I have heard that this could cause a laptop to catch fire
> because of the heavy load on the system.
> Jim K