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Foundry / Matthew Smith Some laptop makers make keyboard part of the airflow system. Acer, for example, uses an “air inlet” keyboard on some models to pull in even more cool air from above. But while airflow is important, chassis material matters too. Aluminum is the kind of material we see in premium laptops. It conducts heat well enough, sure, but it can get pretty hot to the touch. Plastic is more insulating, so it keeps inside while the outside stays at a comfortable temperature. HP’s Haval Othman also highlighted how much thought goes into where the heat ultimately winds up in a laptop: 

It’s usually the cooling system that determines how long a laptop can keep going at peak speed and not the processor. They might start the race on equal footing as far as performance goes, but a thicker design with robust cooling will likely sustain higher speeds for longer periods of time. A thinner laptop is more likely to throttle after a few minutes of heavy use. We’ve actually seen this exact scenario play out here at PCWorld. In PCWorld’s testing, the bigger Acer Swift 16 AI produced a better result than the smaller MSI Prestige Flip 14 AI+ in our Handbrake 0.9.9 encode benchmark, which