The amount of heat also depends on how much money the fulfillment house decided to save. The lower-end models are typically manufactured in mainland china. For instance, you may have the same fullfillment factory in china construct essentially the same laptops for three different clients: toshiba, compaq, and HP. The board layouts and small features might be different, but it's basically the same heat dissipation for that model. Fullfilment factory designs go low cost with an all plastic bottom which unfortunately holds the heat in and will make the fan run a lot if not all the time (unless it is totally idling). In comparison, my 1920 x 1080 Dell laptop has a metal plate on bottom that gets hot. I use a 2-fan cooling pad which of course cools that metal plate down and thus the laptop's own fans come on every now and then mostly due to the ATI GPU card inside. At least they never need to run at the "fast" speed level (that dell laptop has two separate fans: one for the CPU and one for the GPU). The world awaits a thermally-conductive plastic that is strong enough to not crack when used in the shell of the laptop. It'd be kind of neat if the entire body of the laptop got hot since a cooling pad would really work wonders then.
Dell was smart with the battery placement and put it on the side closest to the user (underneath the touchpad). This kept it away from the hot part of the laptop and improves battery lifespan. Sam's Club leaves their laptops on, so I bet you could bring in a folding@mars program on a USB stick and quickly install it to run. They have free WiFi at my Sam's Club courtesy of AT&T so you could go shopping in the club and then come back to see which models ran hottest or made the most noise. You prolly want to turn the program off because it would be unfair for al those laptops and PCs at Sam's Club to be adding counts to your total. *ahem*
