in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process [..]
This could also apply to thermal throttling of the CPU. Imagine if your laptop is on that edge, with some dust in the heatsinks and fans, then a can of compressed air and an install of ThrottleStop (or other software) to underclock a little and reduce the maximum boost frequency, and thereby reduce thermal throttling, might make it run smoother and faster-on-average.
Or another possibility:
If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.
in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process [..]
This could also apply to thermal throttling of the CPU. Imagine if your laptop is on that edge, with some dust in the heatsinks and fans, then a can of compressed air and an install of ThrottleStop (or other software) to underclock a little and reduce the maximum boost frequency, and thereby reduce thermal throttling, might make it run smoother and faster-on-average.
Or another possibility:
If your fan is spinning up when scrolling in Slack it's likely an indication that Electron (Chrome) is refusing to use the GPU for rendering acceleration. This is likely either due to a driver issue or the driver/gpu being on chrome's blacklist. I had this problem once on a hackintosh and as I recall starting Slack from a terminal with the `--ignore-gpu-blacklist` option fixed it.
If you NetFlix from Chrome, that might be worth a try, or upgrade/downgrade display drivers for testing. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19415775 )
An i7 that could stream video, should still be able to stream video. If it can't, something has gone wrong, and should be traceable and fixable.