I doubt it will be passive on the go considering the games it will be playing...

Considering what the dock looks like, I doubt there will be a fan down there that is able to push enough air from the bottom to the top to give it a noticable performance boost.

And how on earth do laptops usually work like that? Macbooks maybe but those are laughable when it comes to playing games. I have a 1 year old laptop with a dedicated Nvidia GPU (and not a very high end one either) and the fan never turns off even when it is unplugged... I have rarely even seen a laptop where the fan turns off...

Also resolution isn't the only factor that goes into games that determines how much usage it requires out of the hardware...

Your kidding right? O_o why waste 2-4watts or whatever on a fan spinning around, and the noise it adds.

I think it would be much more elegant to have just passive cooling, and have the fan be in the dock, and it blow air through it when docked.

Its better on weight/battery life/size is also a huge issue why waste it on a fan?/noise when on the go.

The resolution part is the biggest factor though, so maybe the cpu part downclocks less than the gpu part.

And yes most laptops ive had if your not doing something task heavy, if you unplug them the fan stops (and only powers up if its getting to hot).

Whatever is cheaper. No one is buying a system like this for power.

I thought the same thing. A HDMI port and a stand does not have to be that big.

An HDMI port and stand COULD be that big. Hoping it's more though.

Because if say Zelda is already 30 fps with fan, it will go lower without? And fans also have variable power draw depending on speed? You do know the entire point of this tablet is for gaming right? If it can't do gaming well, there is no point for it... I am not saying have the fan on all the time since there is no point if it is in standby but certainly have it on when it is playing games.

It would be more elegant but if it comes at the sacrafice of playing games at sub 30 fps for a gaming tablet, then I would rather have the fan... Just having a fan does not make it noisey considering there are fans out there designed to be quiet.

GPU/CPU usage is dependent on the game. If a game is cpu bound and you downclock the cpu, that would be bad... And again, it depends on the game. If it is a open world game like zelda, than the resolution wouldn't be the biggest factor since open world games are cpu bound.

Really? Any with dedicated gpu? My mom has an low end amd laptop and the fan still runs...

Mine certainly doesn't.

It will "boost" allot less often, but it can still hit the same clockrate ceiling if I am running something demanding, unless I specifically throw it into power saving mode where the power states are more aggressive.

I would not say overclock, it is possible that the NS does not use the full power of its specs while in handheld mode.

Well, some devices increase performance when charging. So why not?
When on the go, maybe it enters in a battery save mode, which diminish the performance. Developers will make games thinking in the specs on the go(the lower one). And then, test if the high performance mode can handle better native resolution for tv screen without compromise FPS, if so, there is a gain on tv...

It's a possibility, but not sure how much it would affect.