Cooling pads for laptops with no bottom vents

virgult

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Jan 20, 2013
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Hi all,

I'd like this to be a discussion about external cooling pads (not thermal pads for heatsinks!) to be placed underneath a laptop.

I have a Dell Latitude 7300 that I need to hit with some really tough and long workloads sometimes (deep learning and video editing), while working on further coding at the same time. No money for a desktop PC. The cooling really can't cope with the current summer heat (>30°C), the CPU thermal-throttles, the whole laptop becomes hot and sweaty, and the fan is deafening. I found I can fix that with a cooling pad as that laptop has an air intake from the bottom and an exhaust at the back.

But what about my wife's 2015 Macbook Pro? She also has the same problems, but her bottom panel is one solid piece of aluminium! Aren't fans a bit pointless in that case? Could a cooling pad with a turbine like this be more effective:

Keen to hear stories of owners of MBPs or any other laptops with no bottom vents. Thank you all!
 
If the MacBook Pro looks similar to this:
4IpJ4MbMOfcwDVDi.medium


The vents are the slits on the left and right sides.
 
Best you can do is to keep the vents clear.
Modern motherboards and processors will, by default try to boost to maximum performance.
If the cooler is not up to the task, you will throttle.

It is counter-intuitive, but, try changing the windows balanced power profile advanced functions to a max of 90% instead of the default of 100%
You may not notice the reduced cpu performance.
 
If your laptop's cooling system is clogged or too weak, an external cooling pad won't help much.

some laptops use aluminum covers to dissipate heat, it's work fairly well when the thermal paste is fresh and the room has AC.