[PBondurant]

IMO title is clickbaity; it's a statement-of-opinion-masquerading-as-a-question.

Effectively the parent is saying 'fan noise is up there with performance as my most important metric in a laptop'.

This may be true for the OP, but it's by no means a universal consideration. Personally, battery life comes before fan noise for me as a metric. YMMV.

[scarface74]

To a first approximation, if the fan is going (and using energy) because the CPU is running hot under load (using energy), doesn’t that give you a hint about battery efficiency?

[jononor]

Two laptop model with the same CPU can have big differences in thermal design, which impacts a lot the fan noise but battery efficiency only in a marginal way.

[a1445c8b]

Sounds like you’ve just supported the point about fan noise being a good approximation for battery efficiency.