Best settings to keep laptop cool and quiet?

[MartinW]

I like to use FS-UAE on my MacBook Pro and Win-UAE on my PC to develop a bit and test stuff out before going to my real Amigas.

So in an ideal world I'd just run everything as fast as possible on the MBP just like I do on the gaming PC but the sad fact is that laptops are rubbish when it comes to CPU intensive stuff and MBP's are particularly bad. If I let FS-UAE go at full speed then the heat ramps up, the fans start screaming and ultimately the battery drains (if I'm on battery).

I can get round this quite nicely by setting:

'uae_cpu_speed = real'
'uae_cpu_multiplier = 0'
'uae_cpu_frequency = 100'

But 100Mhz, while real, is then a bit sluggish for emulation.

Is there a 'sweet spot' combination of settings where I can still limit things and keep things cool / quiet yet still run at a reasonable speed? According to the source cpu_frequency tops out at 100. Benchmarks tell me that when 'free-running' the emulated frequency is running at some ridiculous rate (if the benchmark is accurate) so I'm guessing 500 would probably still be very cool and quiet!

[EDIT] Never mind - unless I'm wrong, I think using the multiplier instead of directly setting the frequency should allow me to go higher and higher until I find the point where the laptop starts getting stressed out. Obviously up to the maximum of 256 x 3.546895 or just over 900Mhz which ought to be enough for any Amiga!

[meynaf]

I don't know for FS-UAE, but WinUAE has "cpu idle" setting to free the host cpu when the emulated machine is idle. I can then set the speed to max without any problem on my laptop.

[MartinW]

I need to have a look and see if there are other settings that need to be used together with 'cpu_idle'. I just did an initial quick test with cpu_idle set to it's max of 10 and the cpu running at max speed and it helped a little but the fans still ramped up if I started doing something like playing a game.

[meynaf]

Games usually go up to 100% cpu. But they don't need all available horsepower, so you can reduce the cpu speed when running one.

[MrGimper]

Originally Posted by MartinW

I like to use FS-UAE on my MacBook Pro and Win-UAE on my PC to develop a bit and test stuff out before going to my real Amigas.

So in an ideal world I'd just run everything as fast as possible on the MBP just like I do on the gaming PC but the sad fact is that laptops are rubbish when it comes to CPU intensive stuff and MBP's are particularly bad. If I let FS-UAE go at full speed then the heat ramps up, the fans start screaming and ultimately the battery drains (if I'm on battery).

I can get round this quite nicely by setting:

'uae_cpu_speed = real'
'uae_cpu_multiplier = 0'
'uae_cpu_frequency = 100'

But 100Mhz, while real, is then a bit sluggish for emulation.

Is there a 'sweet spot' combination of settings where I can still limit things and keep things cool / quiet yet still run at a reasonable speed? According to the source cpu_frequency tops out at 100. Benchmarks tell me that when 'free-running' the emulated frequency is running at some ridiculous rate (if the benchmark is accurate) so I'm guessing 500 would probably still be very cool and quiet!

[EDIT] Never mind - unless I'm wrong, I think using the multiplier instead of directly setting the frequency should allow me to go higher and higher until I find the point where the laptop starts getting stressed out. Obviously up to the maximum of 256 x 3.546895 or just over 900Mhz which ought to be enough for any Amiga!

Would you mind posting all the relevant settings you finally settled on, I'd like to do the same on my MacBook.

Thanks

[MartinW]

I'll try to remember tonight for you.

[MartinW]

So, I have to say, I've been distracted from what I planned to do and haven't used it much lately but I'm sat here now on the sofa using the MacBook on battery and the fan isn't coming on...

I have 68060 selected under CPU, no JIT. Custom settings as follows:

uae_cpu_cycle_exact = true
uae_cpu_multiplier = 150
uae_cpu_speed = real
uae_cpu_throttle = 0.0

Note that I don't recall off the top of my head whether any of those settings override each other. I also haven't been using the system for games, doing so may make the fans / cpu etc. ramp up?

[Galahad/FLT]

I would have a look at your fan and heat vent and see if its clogged with dust.

My laptop recently would be screaming as well, so I blew through the fan and a load of dust came out the side vent, and ever since then, the fan runs much quieter and not so hot.

[MartinW]

It's not long been back to Apple to have it's keyboard replaced which not very sensibly involved replacing the entire upper half laptop shell because Apple didn't have enough common sense to make the keyboard a separate part (!) so it will be like new in there. It's just thermally challenged as it's an i7 squeezed into the thinnest slab of aluminium - usual stuff.

Anyway, fans don't come on with those settings above and it seems plenty fast enough.

[MrGimper]

Thanks for coming back with the settings.

I can't see uae_cpu_cycle_exact in the docs as an option, and uae_cpu_speed = real equates to ("Approximate A500/A1200 or cycle-exact")

https://github.com/FrodeSolheim/fs-u...er/doc/options

[MartinW]

You're right, I can't see that option any more either. It's curious because I thought that any unrecognised options were automatically removed when you saved the settings but maybe I'm wrong on that, or maybe that doesn't apply to uae custom settings - i'd have to dig into the source code to find that out and I've not really got any interest in doing that. I suspect that when I started experimenting I copied these settings from one of my other systems which may or may not have been Win-UAE instead of FS-UAE so maybe it is an option there??

Anyway, yes, you're right that 'uae_cpu_speed = real' is equivalent to cycle-exact but that's why I also have 'uae_cpu_multiplier' in there because if you are using cycle exact then you can specify the mutplier which is given to be multiples of 3.546895 or 3.579545 (PAL or NTSC).

This means that my settings say rather than just letting it run as fast as it can (causing heat and noise), run at 150 * 3.546895 = 532.03425Mhz which for me causes neither. I did play about with higher mutipliers and there was a level that would cause the fans to kick in but I didn't exhaustively test it. 150 was a round figure that seemed to be a reasonable compromise, no doubt I could get it higher. If I were to instead specify a cpu frequency (uae_cpu_frequency) then the maximum would be 100 (Mhz).

[MrGimper]

Originally Posted by MartinW

You're right, I can't see that option any more either. It's curious because I thought that any unrecognised options were automatically removed when you saved the settings but maybe I'm wrong on that, or maybe that doesn't apply to uae custom settings - i'd have to dig into the source code to find that out and I've not really got any interest in doing that. I suspect that when I started experimenting I copied these settings from one of my other systems which may or may not have been Win-UAE instead of FS-UAE so maybe it is an option there??

Anyway, yes, you're right that 'uae_cpu_speed = real' is equivalent to cycle-exact but that's why I also have 'uae_cpu_multiplier' in there because if you are using cycle exact then you can specify the mutplier which is given to be multiples of 3.546895 or 3.579545 (PAL or NTSC).

This means that my settings say rather than just letting it run as fast as it can (causing heat and noise), run at 150 * 3.546895 = 532.03425Mhz which for me causes neither. I did play about with higher mutipliers and there was a level that would cause the fans to kick in but I didn't exhaustively test it. 150 was a round figure that seemed to be a reasonable compromise, no doubt I could get it higher. If I were to instead specify a cpu frequency (uae_cpu_frequency) then the maximum would be 100 (Mhz).

All understood, thanks again. Will have a play on my MacBook.