The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.
Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by running Furmark and Cinebench together.
We placed 5 diodes on the rear to give a rough indication of how hot the machine might feel on your knee.
At idle, the system runs very cool and fan noise is low, however it doesn't take long to heat up when heavily loaded. When watching videos on YouTube or working within Photoshop for instance. The rear of the laptop gets much hotter than the front, especially in the diode 1 position. We found that much of the internal heat was actually coming from the 7,200 rpm hard drive – we really would recommend an SSD drive for this laptop, not only for performance gains, but temperature reductions.