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Do laptop cooling pads work or are they just propaganda?

BaidDSB
By BaidDSB
in Cooling
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Today i played the first game [xdefiant] on my newish laptop and wow it got hot.

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A laptop getting hot while gaming is expected.

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Kinda? The goal is to get more air into the chassis. Laptop cooling pads work by just forcing air at the bottom of the laptop chassis in general, but the bottom plate doesnt really do anything for cooling, so most of that airflow is wasted.

 

If you have a big gaming laptop which has a lot of vent holes:

s-l1200.thumb.jpg.2f93fe698e26f3c6d594f913f3f0dc73.jpg

 

Cooling pads can help a decent bit. But it still mostly has to do with how much gets to the cpu/gpu coolers. Because throwing air through those holes will help keep the board cool in general, but even more would be done with forcing more air into the heatsink intake fans.

 

My old thinkpad P50 for example had the two main intakes on the top corners of the bottom of the laptop:

Lenovo-ThinkPad-P50-Bottom.jpg.f6a3a1c674020874f4c88c98e6b40952.jpg

And having a laptop cooling pad with fans which sat directly below those intakes would drop load temperatures substantially, upwards of 20 degrees cooler under sustained load. A cooling pad with just one big fan in the middle or several small fans all over the place would do nothing.

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Laptop cooling pads work as well as shoving a tiny rectangle object under the back of it lifting it off of the table.

 

The goal is to get more air here into the system with less resistance. Making the distance between a solid surface and the vents bigger is how to do so.

 

Any active fans or any of that provide NO BENEFIT AT ALL. The fans in the laptop do the cooling these other fans just waste electricity as they can't force more air into the device in any way. What can happen is that when the fans are off in a laptop and the cooling pad fans are DIRECTLY blowing into the cooling holes you end up with accidental airflow in the laptop and some bonus cooling at idle.

 

The only time this can help a teeny tiny bit is with laptops that use the chassis to cool themselves but those are basically non existant as that is technically a health hazard if they use the bottom panel.

 

But largely just lift the butt up from the laptop and well thats all you need.

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57 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

A laptop getting hot while gaming is expected.

the keyboard was getting too hot to touch

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lifting any laptop up, and giving it moving/fresh air to intake rather then hot stale air will work, even if its not pushed directly into the laptop

 

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Fwiw, my dad's work laptop(HP EliteBook something) I think got ridiculously hot while he worked and used to crash. I was skeptical of a cooling pad, but he ended up buying one and the laptop didn't crash again.
I have no idea why the laptop didnt throttle and just outright crashed.

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19 hours ago, BaidDSB said:

the keyboard was getting too hot to touch

Yeah, they do that.  Instead of getting a fan-based cooling pad, think about getting one of those metal laptop stands that are very well-ventilated from the bottom, lift your laptop off the ground, allow for increased airflow.

 

But in reality, any laptop is going to get warm while gaming. One using a high-power CPI and a dedicate GPU will get hot.

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actually yes, but it depends how well the fans line up with the laptops intakes...

 

on my laptop which gets around 80c without it, its good enough for ~15-20c lower temps enabling me to actually play games which is otherwise impossible because the laptop also starts throttling like hell at like ~70c 😅

 

 

On 5/26/2024 at 11:54 PM, jaslion said:

Laptop cooling pads work as well as shoving a tiny rectangle object under the back of it lifting it off of the table.

 

The goal is to get more air here into the system with less resistance. Making the distance between a solid surface and the vents bigger is how to do so.

 

Any active fans or any of that provide NO BENEFIT AT ALL. The fans in the laptop do the cooling these other fans just waste electricity as they can't force more air into the device in any way. What can happen is that when the fans are off in a laptop and the cooling pad fans are DIRECTLY blowing into the cooling holes you end up with accidental airflow in the laptop and some bonus cooling at idle.

 

The only time this can help a teeny tiny bit is with laptops that use the chassis to cool themselves but those are basically non existant as that is technically a health hazard if they use the bottom panel.

 

But largely just lift the butt up from the laptop and well thats all you need.

... wrong?

 

my cooling pad without the fans on will indeed lower the temps by like 5c... way too little to be of any effect... with fans on tho.... its also really noticeable because the keyboard stays relatively cool with the fans on.

 

 

by the way it was the cheapest cooling pad i could find on amazon... 15 bucks or so lol... 

 

14 hours ago, aisle9 said:

Instead of getting a fan-based cooling pad, think about getting one of those metal laptop stands that are very well-ventilated from the bottom, lift your laptop off the ground, allow for increased airflow.

see above... would file that under internet myth tbh, or you didn't make sure the fans did actually align with the intake vents.

 

 

case in point:

 

 

16 hours ago, RockSolid1106 said:

Fwiw, my dad's work laptop(HP EliteBook something) I think got ridiculously hot while he worked and used to crash. I was skeptical of a cooling pad, but he ended up buying one and the laptop didn't crash again.
I have no idea why the laptop didnt throttle and just outright crashed.

very similar experience here too... my laptop didn't crash... but throttling sub 1ghz made it unusable for gaming anyways. 

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It will help to cool chassis. But wont improve performance.

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1c drop in temps if ur lucky 

 

but u can mod  one  (and remove the backplate when its going to be stationary for a while)

image.thumb.png.aa7c5220cecb4e6bc58eadec963ede15.png

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Options include, as stated before:

  • making sure that there is a significant space between the laptop and any barriers, and a flat surface or, even worse,  your lap, a pillow, a blanket, or anything else that will block the vents, especially crazy ants! 😉
  • A laptop stand that has fans that match both the position and direction of flow of your hot box...errr... error... fans. Despite the denials of others, I, too, have trapped the benefits of a stand although at that time I got lucky in choosing one that worked well with my overheating HP a decade or so ago. 
  • Get a Frore Systems AirJet and mod your laptop with it.
  • Do what Kris showed. 
  • Get a better computer (desktop) and use the laptop for things that aren't heavy load. 

If none of those options are appealing, let us know. 

I've been using computers since around 1978, started learning programming in 1980 on Apple IIs, started learning about hardware in 1990, ran a BBS from 1990-95, built my first Windows PC around 2000, taught myself malware removal starting in 2005 (also learned on Bleeping Computer), learned web dev starting in 2017, and I think I can fill a thimble with all that knowledge. 😉 I'm not an expert, which is why I keep investigating the answers that others give to try and improve my knowledge, so feel free to double-check the advice I give.

My phone's auto-correct is named Otto Rong.🤪😂

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