[SOLVED] Could someone recommend a good if not great cooling pad for a laptop that is for gaming?

[minnin90]

Mine is a cheapo one and I'm looking for one with a lot of fans or just something really good. No budget but please give me a variety of options if you know of some. Thank you so much.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Pointless. The problems that laptops have with cooling while gaming or running very demanding applications cannot be resolved through the use of a cooling pad. The only thing cooling pads are any good for is lowering the temperature of the the case itself so that it is not uncomfortable to have your hands on the keyboard or touchpad. If you are having actual thermal issues with CPU core temp or GPU temperatures, that isn't going to be resolved using any form of external cooling device like a cooling pad or drive bay fan.

In those cases, only a tear down and re-paste of the heatsink and/or replacement of any internal cooling fan that is either not working or has become weak is likely to do any good and even THAT is only likely if no permanent thermal damage has already occurred. If it has, then you're just going to throw good money after bad. This is exactly the problem with trying to game on laptops, whether they are labeled as "gaming" laptops or not. Laptops can only fit so much cooling under the hood, and what they use despite hardware becoming more power hungry and heat intensive hasn't changed much over the last ten to fifteen years. It simply is too hard for the most part to provide cooling for hardware that is packed into a tiny space, and expect it to be capable of doing that for hours like a well configured gaming desktop is able to do.

Add to that the fact that most people, at some point or other, end up with the device on their knees (With their pants blocking off the cooling vents in a lot of cases), or on their bed (With the blankets blocking off cooling vent intake) or on carpeted floors (Same thing here too) or getting turned on inside a laptop case and overheating to small or large degrees over and over again. Before long, you're past the point where ANYTHING is going to help, but even before any of that happens it's just a fact that everybody wants to try and squeeze more out of a laptop that already is pushing it's limits, and they end up forcing the issue.

So, a cooling pad will make the laptop FEEL cooler, but if CPU core temp or GPU related temps are the problem, it simply will not have any effect on those temperatures as they are almost entirely unaffected by anything cooling related that doesn't specifically pertain to the heatsink itself and the internal fan designed to cool the heatsink. External fans have no real effect on those internal temperatures.

 

[minnin90]

that said why do temps go down some for me using mine?

 

[Darkbreeze]

Wishful thinking? IDK, but I DO know that I've seen enough professional reviews of such devices, and have tried them a time or two on the bench, and in all cases there have never been any appreciable thermal gains in areas that matter.

Probably also depends on WHAT you are using to monitor thermals WITH, and WHICH thermal sensors you are looking at. The ones that matter for a laptop being CPU core temperature (And there are multiple CPU related temperature sensors, so don't confuse one for another), package temperature and GPU related temperatures. These are the ones that can cause throttling and shut downs HOWEVER there is another very important one which is the voltage regulator or VRM temperatures, which are rarely monitored by most people and are highly likely to cause throttling.

What, exactly, makes you believe you NEED such a device?

 

[minnin90]

What, exactly, makes you believe you NEED such a device?


just cooler temps is all

 

[Darkbreeze]

So you don't actually know if your current temps are even within specifications or outside specifications, or you do? And if you do, what, exactly, are your core, VRM and GPU temps maxing out at?