Editing two videos at 92 degrees

August 9, 20262 min read

This was my desktop this afternoon, halfway through editing two promos at once.

A Sway desktop with four panes: top left a CSS diff of a WhatsApp mockup, bottom left a GSAP timeline being tuned, on the right one session writing to a skills inbox and another closing out a deliverables table. The top bar reads 38 degrees and the title says Crear animación cortinilla para promos.

Four panes, two videos. On the left, video-1-promo: the CSS of a WhatsApp mockup up top, and below it the fine-tuning of a fade to black in GSAP — 0.52 s starting at 5.98 wasn't working, because the last rendered frame came out at 43/255, a dirty grey instead of true black. It ended up at 0.46 starting from 5.88. On the right, video-2-promo, closing out its deliverables table.

The top bar says 38 °C. That's the weather in Nuevo Laredo, not the machine.

The machine, in that same minute:

$ sensors
Package id 0:  +92.0°C  (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:        +88.0°C
Core 1:        +92.0°C
Core 2:        +84.0°C
Core 3:        +88.0°C
fan1:        5093 RPM  (min = 0 RPM, max = 4900 RPM)
fan2:        5100 RPM  (min = 0 RPM, max = 4900 RPM)

$ uptime
16:33:06 up 3 days, 19:39,  load average: 11.24, 20.50, 19.44

Eight degrees under thermal shutdown, with both fans spinning above their own rated maximum — 5093 against a 4900 RPM spec. And a load average of 20.50 over the last five minutes, on 8 threads. The queue of processes waiting for a turn was twice the size of the machine.

Memory was worse:

$ free -h
               total        used        free       available
Mem:            15Gi        13Gi       933Mi           2.2Gi
Swap:           15Gi        15Gi       130Mi

Swap full. Fifteen gigabytes of compressed memory with 130 megabytes of air left. Twenty Claude processes alive at once, the oldest seventeen hours in.

This is a 2015 i7-6820HQ. Four cores, 45 watts, and thermal paste that hasn't been changed in a decade: nine of the last ninety-one hours were spent throttling on heat, ten percent of its uptime.

Both videos shipped anyway.

I'm not posting this as a flex about the hardware — I'm posting it because it's exactly the diagnosis I wrote up earlier this week in Two bottlenecks, one laptop: RAM is what limits this kind of work, and heat is what breaks video calls. Here both numbers show up at the same time, under a real load, nothing synthetic about it.

The retro desktop looks better once you know it's running at 92 degrees underneath.