As notebooks get smaller and thinner and specs run to ever-higher numbers, the memory inside is getting as hot as a June bride in a feather bed. The newest thin-and-light notebooks are using DDR2-667 SO-DIMMs these days, and even though they’re not exactly hot enough to fry an egg, they can almost boil water, reaching 85°C. Temperatures like that could result in molten plastic dripping into your nether regions as you perch one of these babies on your lap. Ouch.
One way to solve that heat problem inside notebooks is to use lots of fans, which are noisy and take up too much space. So Intel is using a thermal sensor that determines when to throttle those memory modules, taking their speed down by 50%, from 667MHz to 333MHz. But Intel says, surprisingly, that throttle-down shouldn’t have an impact on performance unless the graphics share the RAM with the CPU. Really?
Heat hits notebooks as specs rise [the Inquirer]
