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Old 13th July 2020, 09:23   #8  |  Link
FranceBB
Broadcast Encoder
 
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Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, UK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RanmaCanada View Post
I would not recommend encoding on a laptop if you value the life of it.
True.
Most laptops overheat quickly.

Quote:
Originally Posted by blackdark View Post
i'm not often at home because of my job i travel with my laptop
That's pretty much the reason why I've got a laptop in 2016 after spending years on Desktop computers (1998-2015). The thing is that if you really wanna encode with it, download something to tweak your frequencies, turn off the "turbo boost" and also downclock the CPU a little bit, this way it will automatically decrease the VCore and therefore less current will pass and the CPU will heat less and you're probably gonna be fine.
For instance, although I try to encode on a Xeon with a Desktop all the time, when I'm with my laptop (which has an i7 6700HQ), I turn the fan to the maximum speed, I downclock it from 2.60GHz to 1.66GHz and then I let it encode. Temperatures are fine in the 50-58°C range. Sure, it takes forever to encode in H.265 (about a week for 24 min in 4K 23.976p 10bit) but it's worth it 'cause if I leave it the way it is, at 3.50GHz turbo boost, it quickly gets to 95° and then gets throttled 'till it goes to 88° and then it goes back to 95° on all cores. It doesn't matter if you change thermal compound with the artic cooler one, put 4 additional fan underneath the case and another 5000 RPM fan on the side to extract hot air, it will always still overheat unless you downclock (and downvolt) it. Honestly, I don't know what laptop manufacturers have in mind, but clearly they seem to gamble on the fact that "people will never use the CPU at 100%, they'll probably just go to twitter, facebook, instagram and outlook" and they just don't care about stress tests...


So in a nutshell: yes, you can encode on a laptop, provided that you downclock/downvolt it and you keep temperatures under control with software like Speccy (if you're on Windows) or lm_sensors (if you're on Linux).

Last edited by FranceBB; 13th July 2020 at 09:26.
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