Dear fellow crunchers, I have bought a Samsung Ativ9 I5 laptop.

The I5 is a Haswell dye, as you know.

I am trying to optimise also this machine, but I do not want to bake it...

Also, we are still missing (till it is not ready) a version of TThrottle able to recognise and manage the Intel GPU, so further preoccupations grow in me to not overload the CPU/GPU. Haswell notoriously dissipates badly the heat, therefore more problems and preoccupations...

So, here are my experiences and questions for you:

1) I am using the optimised applications and at the moment I am only crunching MB tasks. They have lower payout as we all know, but I am not using constantly this PC, therefore the very long crunching times of AP tasks combined with the shorter deadlines would have caused way too many problems in respecting the deadlines.

2) In this configuration, CPU seldom works at loads higher than 50% (just when starting, then receiding to 50%), no matter what I try to do with the settings of PC and BOINC. Also, clock tends to stay at about 1.5 GHz.

3) Temperature tends to stay in this case below 75 °C.

Questions:

1) How much can I push the CPU temperaturewise? Haswell has a Tg of about 100 °C if I am not wrong, but where can we safely get?
2) Is there a way, if temperature stay still safe, to increase CPU load and clock?
3) Any advice to control the GPU until there is a new TThrottle version?

I thank you all for your help and I hope my first experiences can be useful to someone else.

Sleepy

For the heat issue, elevate the laptop up off of the desk or surface. This can be done simply with four small solid objects that are all basically the same (such as the cardboard core from a roll of electrical tape). Or you can get a laptop cooling pad that has fans on it.

Second, I don't know how that laptop is designed, but out of the 20 or so different models of laptops I have had my hands on, they are generally pretty much the same in their design. There is typically a removable plastic trim piece above the keyboard that pops off. The CPU fan is typically under this plastic trim piece. On my Dell Latitude, the CPU fan is actually under the top-left corner of the keyboard.

If you don't plan on using the laptop for anything other than crunching, prop the keyboard up to allow better air-flow into the very compact internal components. Maybe even get a small desk fan (here in the US, we have small 4-6 inch (10-15cm) personal desk fans that plug into AC power at a very low cost at most stores) and aim it so that it blows air under the keyboard.

That should take care of the heat issues.

As far as only crunching at 50%, check your computing preferences and make sure the venue the laptop is assigned to is set to use 100% of the processors. Also make sure your local BOINC client doesn't have over-ride preferences. As far as getting the clock speed to increase, I believe since the default for CPU tasks is to run at low priority, that does not trigger the CPU to go to full speed. You will need to disable CPU throttling either in the BIOS for the laptop, or maybe you can set the power profile in Windows to "high performance" instead of "balanced" or "power saver". You may have to go in and customize the options for the power profile under the CPU section and change the throttle limits on it.

Basically all modern processors will clock down and shut cores off if they get too hot before any damage occurs. Most laptops just shut off if they get to a factory-specified temperature, which is usually 10-15C below the "meltdown" point of the CPU or GPU, so that shouldn't be a problem, as long as the fans are kept clean. Every two weeks or so, if you have the keyboard propped up, you will need to shut down and blow the heatsinks out in the reverse direction of air flow to get the dust out of them.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)