Temperatures, Cooling and Noise

The drawbacks of shoving a discrete video card into an Ultrabook chassis include shorter battery life and more heat, two things that a company has to be cognizant of when making the choice of what discrete GPU to use.

The NVIDIA 650M used by GIGABYTE is the same GPU that I have in my personal laptop. My personal laptop is much thicker, yet it still gets really hot. Part of this is due to the quad-core CPU, but some of it can be attributed to the GPU.

As you can see, on the front of the system, we logged a maximum temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit. This high temperature was located directly in the middle of the WSAD keys. The palm rests stayed a cool 75 degrees Fahrenheit. This is likely due to having a solid state drive, which produces minimal heat compared to a traditional disk drive.

Moving around to the back side, temperatures were even higher. The maximum observed temperature was 133 degrees Fahrenheit. This was observed directly above hot air exhaust port. The rest of the system ranged from 75 degrees to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. All of the hotter temperatures were towards the back of the system where the processor, GPU, and heatsink assembly are located.

The maximum observed GPU temperature was 79 degrees Celsius, a temperature well within the limits for a video card. The CPU reached a maximum of 84 degrees Celsius, a temperature that is on the high end of what a CPU should be running at, but still within a safe limit.

While gaming, one should avoid using this notebook on their laps, due to the high heat registered on the back near the exhaust vents. Normal web surfing or other low power tasks should be fine to use on the lap or other soft surface.

The GIGABYTE U2442F produced a sound level of 47 decibels in our measurement. Our measurement is taken in front of the laptop at roughly head level. For comparison, 30dB is a totally quiet night time in the desert, 40dB is whispering and 60dB is a normal conversation.