How well does a laptop cooling pad work? We Amazon'd one ourselves to find out

[Alex544]

Congratulations!
You just thought of the worst gaming laptop ever, a 55W GPU is not even close to a good average gaming GPU

55w is kinda 2060 max-q. its a good average gaming gpu. much closer to the top than to the bottom.
i recommend you to lower you video settings next time you need more fps. its not difficult. ah, hardware unboxed told you ultra settings is the best? this changes things. well, you need more money then and headphones and cooling pad.

as pointed out, 2060 max q is not 55w. it's 80w. a 1660ti max q would be closer to that value (60w). why would you pay for a gimped GPU when the full version is same price? what is your logic blake? why would you want the GPU/CPU to be gimped?

"lower your video settings"??? WHY WHEN YOU CAN GET THE NON MAX Q VERSION? ASDHAJKSHDJKASHD

arguing with you kills my brain cells if I'm being honest.

[S.Yu]

I just bought a 200mm Noctua Fan with a fan-to-USB power cable.

Found a sturdy piece of cardboard that was roughly the size of my laptop and cut a hole for the Noctua to blow through. Was able to use the fan mounting screws to secure it to the cardboard.

I'm out... $30? Plus what ever it cost me to buy what ever the cardboard came from... still... not too shabby.

Looks Ghetto... but I'm running low 30's on my MSI GS65 2018.  So it works.

Arts and crafts hour turned into a win for me this weekend.

Wow, $30 is high end these days, I got a whole cooling pad with 5 fans in it and an aluminum surface, and it's less than $20, and I just looked and now it's on sale for about $14.5.

[JamesH]

Just saw this article and had to comment.  Obviously if the fans are that noisy, you have the wrong cooler.  I have a Tongfang GK7CP7S, known by many names from CyberPower PC, PC Specialists, Eluktronics, Mech 17, etc.  It has the 9750H and the RTX2070 non MaxQ.  It gets hot on it's own with plenty of thermal throttling.  95°C on average playing a AAA game.  Enter the CoolerMaster U3 cooling pad.  Three fans that can be placed anywhere underneath the pad to align with your laptop air intakes.  Add Throttlestop to drop voltages by .119mv.  Now the highest temp recorded for the CPU while playing a AAA game on max settings is 83°c. with the GPU recording 77°c.  Best of all, it's very QUIET!

[Khoji]

Cooling pads actually cool in two different ways: by blowing air into existing vents (described in the article) and by cooling the bottom of the laptop itself (not described). For example, they work well with MacBooks, even though they don't have any vents on the bottom, because the metal bottom of the computer is used as a heatsink. To a certain extent this also works on metal chassis laptops that don't use the chassis as a heatsink, because cooling the metal bottom will also carry away heat from the inside of the laptop.

Many cooling pads are not well designed for the second method, because there is almost no gap between the fans and the bottom of the laptop, so that both convection from and airflow across the metal surface are restricted.

[Ethan Hawks]

Really impressed by the detailed information about the laptop cooling pad and its working. check this article to add more knowledge to your page.
budgetbeasts.com/how-do-laptop-cooling-pads-work