Technology

Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn't really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what's actually happening.

That said, I've had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they're still... not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that's a tradeoff all on it's own.

Doesn't sound normal to me. But those newer CPUs can scale the frequency extremely fast, so looking at the numbers in Task Manager might not be too meaningful.
Didn't have any heating/fan issues on a 13th gen Framework Laptop 13 in either Windows 11 or Linux. But haven't exactly looked at the clocks either. And don't have access to those notebooks currently.

But the hardware vendors can mess up either thermal paste/cooling in gerneral, or force weird clock behavior via the bios/efi/acpi tables.

I've run into an issue once in the advanced power options in Windows. Under "processor power management" check to see what the minimum and maximum processor states are.

(note: don't set the maximum to a low number, it makes the computer unusable. Found out the hard way lol)

Have you ran the vendors update utility? I see new Lenovos fairly often and their updates address various things that affect fan and cooling.

Have you adjusted the power plan at all? Use a default “balanced” power plan.

Is there an app that seems to have regular cpu usage?

Did you remove the ads-on antivirus software yet? It’s usually garbage. The built-in windows defender isn’t the best, but it’s good enough and usually doesn’t cause issues.

I recently installed win10 on a 2019 Lenovo thinkpad x1 carbon, and it has similar issues. I don’t use it much, but I’ve wondered how much bloatware is affecting the cpu usage and therefore can speeds. It was running Ubuntu Linux before and while the fan came on sometimes, it was less often and less pronounced.

You could try a live Linux usb to see if you get similar results, that would point to a software issue.

Yes, this is pretty typical. Intel and AMD are currently battling for IPC and multi-threaded performance, efficiency be damned. AMD is definitely doing significantly better with efficiency, though. Check out some notebookcheck.net reviews of equivalent laptops between AMD and Intel, the Thinkpad T14s gen 3 is a great example. That T14s gen 3 AMD is a spectacular laptop, by the way, if you want a good balance of performance, build quality, battery, and quiet operation. We'll see how the gen 4 does soon, but I have high hopes for the efficiency and performance of Zen4/RDNA3 in that machine, though I have a P14s gen 4 on order for 64GB of RAM.

You will also typically get quieter operation in Linux, at least after the support of the machine has matured a bit. I'm excited to give the new AMD P-State EPP driver a try, which is going default with the new kernel that just released yesterday.

I have an Ryzen+Radeon Zephyrus G14 from 2022. It's been great, battery life and performance wise. I run Linux but I'm sure Windows is no worse in this regard.

The only thing I can say is that I misjudged the 14" form factor and regret not getting a 16" model, and the mechanism for lifting the laptop of the table with the lid works great on a table but makes the laptop largely unusable on your lap in the couch.