Are cooling pads for gaming laptops really helpful ?

Futureized

Futureized

Skilled
IF anyone using same, kindly give your suggestions.
There is a mixed reply on internet saying yes and no.

Majority of users claiming, it only helps 4 to 5 %, my laptop has not yet crossed 100*C cpu.

Thanks,
 
2-3 degrees drop is due to the elevation and 2-3 is due to the extra fans it has.

I had experimented this by playing with fan on then off and without keeping it on pad.

I would say definitely worth it for 4-6 degrees drop.
 
In my limited experience, at best it might help a bit if your laptop intake is blocked by surface.

Usually, if cooling system itself is adequate initially then heating problems arise (after a year or so, depending on how much dust there is) because of dust being clogged in the cooling system and/or cpu paste not working as effectively. So same as pc, need to clear out dust. cpu paste probably can be an issue only if default one is crap. In my old laptop, i only had to reapply that once. My desktop cpu paste is also working well after 3 years without reapplying paste. So i dont think we need to keep reapplying.

Also, low power laptops are much easier to manage. I have never had to do anything with 15w cpu only laptops. I dont use cooling pads today, just make sure to have some space open where intake is, for example by placing some small mouse height object below laptop base. If you are going to use laptop keyboard and so need to keep laptop on flat surface for long periods, and intake is at bottom, then it makes sense to use cooling pads.
 
Most of the gaming laptops comes with good cooling solutions, the only thing you need to do with them is to keep them elevated for proper air flow. The cooling pad make sense only if outside temperature is also too high at your place especially in summer days, using them will bring down temperature around 3-5 degrees.
Some cooling pads are more effective than others, and some may not be compatible with your laptop air vents position. If you do decide to use a cooling pad, make sure to choose one that is compatible with your laptop and has good reviews from verified users.
 
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad and it has a known issue with extremely loud fans that don't cool the laptop enough. Most computers start throttle at high temps and this cooling fan helps the sluggish laptop. I bought a cooling pad from Amazon.in that certainly helped me.

It brought down the temperature by 10 degrees. I would say that a cooling pad is really effective for an Indian summer. You could try with a stand as well but since these cooling pads are not too expensive, it is well worth a one time purchase.
 
Cooling pad do help , i was running a Asus Tuf gaming laptop only on cooling pad as fans conked off and were not available anywhere including Authorised service center in the aftermath of Corona
 
Futureized said:
IF anyone using same, kindly give your suggestions.
There is a mixed reply on internet saying yes and no.

Majority of users claiming, it only helps 4 to 5 %, my laptop has not yet crossed 100*C cpu.

Thanks,
Click to expand...
Depends on these:
  1. What is your ambient room temperature?
  2. Laptop model and specs. If you are using Intel's room heaters, you will for sure need a cooling pad. My work laptop has 12th gen Core i5 and bloody thing gets hot in no time. I keep it in vertical position and it helps a bit. My MBP on the other hand won't even turn on fans unless I run heavy tasks.
  3. Placement of air intake vents.
  4. Do you place your laptop on fabric (blocking bottom intake vents)?
  5. Doing any intense productivity/gaming tasks?
 
Do cooling pads help?
Yes, but need a good cooling pad & a laptop with good ventilation. 2020 Asus TUF A15 was infamous for closed-off bottom vents for which the cooling pad didn't help. Check Jarrod Tech review for the same & other laptops where he tests thermals with a cooling pad. Temp reduction also matters on the laptop feet's height, which might block airflow a bit when kept on table.

I have Alienware m15 R1, shit default thermals, hits 100C easily. So I have put a CPU UV, CPU freq limit, CPU power limit & GPU UV. Even with these, I can see average temps of above 90C (92-93C) in certain games when laptop is on a table. But if I use a cooling pad or stand, avg temps drops to 85C or lower in the same game. I used Division 2 for extensive testing in 2019. These are avg. temps in a 30min+ session, max temps can still be 95C or 100C in the former case.

But I observed that a good stand at high enough angles is enough to get the same performance for cheap. Stand is also easier to carry, but using KB becomes uncomfortable.

Cooling pad I have - Deepcool Multicore X6
Stand - Basic foldable stand like this (not this model, some Portronic model)

Most gaming laptops have a good set of fans. So just get a stand for it, that has been my recommendation. Cooling pad reduces the idle temps a bit vs stand because of forced cooling, but gaming temps are similar or a bit worse on cooling pad in my testing (but 1-2C difference is within the margin of error).
 
The reason there are conflicting opinions is precisely because of what @OMEGA44-XT pointed out here

OMEGA44-XT said:
Yes, but need a good cooling pad & a laptop with good ventilation. 2020 Asus TUF A15 was infamous for closed-off bottom vents for which the cooling pad didn't help
Click to expand...

If the fans in the cooling pad align with the vents on the laptop, the impact will be good. If the fans don't align, or your laptop doesn't have intake vents at the bottom, then impact will be low to none.

So before buying a laptop cooling pad, check where the vents are located in your laptop and buy a pad where the fans will align with the vents.

Also, many cooling pads are poorly designed where the fans are near impossible to clean. That is just not tenable in India's dusty environment. Any fan which runs regularly and hasn't been cleaned in 6 months is as good as useless.
 
Futureized said:
my laptop has not yet crossed 100*C cpu.
Click to expand...
It never will, at 100 degrees protection will kick in and throttle the CPU down.

Thermal throttling is not a bad thing, specially on laptops. When task requires lot of computation but in small bursts, the CPU never throttles, the tasks gets done before the die temperature reaches 100 degrees. Fans will kick in giving the CPU more time to run at full performance.

But if the high computation task is very long like rendering a video or something, the CPU is bound to throttle down on Laptops because it's cooling solution is never gonna dissipate 125watts efficiently, like hyper x212 on Desktop does, it keeps the junction temperature of the CPU under 100 degrees, hence the CPU runs at full speed all the time.

So a cooling pad it not gonna magically eliminate the CPU throttling, it might give you some extra time before it throttles.

Ambient temperatures also play a very big role, whatever temps are you seeing, the ambient temperature is added in those, if CPU reads 40 degrees and the room temp is 25, whatever power dissipation that is happing in the CPU is only causing it to rise up in temperature of just 15 degrees.

So with 25 degree room your temperature rise up margin is already reduced to 75 degrees, before it hits 100 and throttles down, all this when CPU is not even turned on.
 
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Heisen said:
It never will, at 100 degrees protection will kick in and throttle the CPU down.

Thermal throttling is not a bad thing, specially on laptops. When task requires lot of computation but in small bursts, the CPU never throttles, the tasks gets done before the die temperature reaches 100 degrees. Fans will kick in giving the CPU more time to run at full performance.

But if the high computation task is very long like rendering a video or something, the CPU is bound to throttle down on Laptops because it's cooling solution is never gonna dissipate 125watts efficiently, like hyper x212 on Desktop does, it keeps the junction temperature of the CPU under 100 degrees, hence the CPU runs at full speed all the time.

So a cooling pad it not gonna magically eliminate the CPU throttling, it might give you some extra time before it throttles.

Ambient temperatures also play a very big role, whatever temps are you seeing, the ambient temperature is added in those, if CPU reads 40 degrees and the room temp is 25, whatever power dissipation that is happing in the CPU is only causing it to rise up in temperature of just 15 degrees.

So with 25 degree room your temperature rise up margin is already reduced to 75 degrees, before it hits 100 and throttles down, all this when CPU is not even turned on.
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My Alienware m15 R1 can hit 105C. AW did shit optimisation in terms of throttling behaviour, it throttles late & when it throttles, it's counter-productive to the performance as well as temps.

A good cooling pad or stand does help the laptop by increasing its cooling potential, its enough to be noticeable. My laptop can cross 90C for CPU at 25W when on a table, but with stand/pad, it can sustain 30W at under 90C temps. CPU - i7 8750H

I agree with your point on ambient temps, observed it myself as well.
 
I do sometimes use Cooling pads for my Laptop. It does helps a bit to cool down. But again as already pointed out by others lots of factors play a role in the efficacy of the pad. Fan air flow is also a considerable point. Some pad comes with 4fans some comes with 2 and even with 1 fan. Since most of the cheap pads are usb powerd they generally provide low air flow and hence less effective. Try to get a good pad with better external power supply to serve your needs. Best way to cool your laptop down is to work in cooler(A/C room) environment.
 
Which laptop do you own OP? It really depends if your laptop vents are in agreement with the cooling pad fans (intake vs outtake) PLUS the way your laptop's bottom chassis is designed (plastic vs metal).
There are options like passive coolers which work best in scenarios where the challenge is no gaps between the laptop bottom for air intakes.
And then there are options like aluminium based coolers which touch the base of your laptop to act as external heatsinks too.

So ultimately, your laptop models, its current layout of fans, and the current stats around thermals all come into play for the level of success a cooler is actually able to give you.
 
OMEGA44-XT said:
Do cooling pads help?
Yes, but need a good cooling pad & a laptop with good ventilation. 2020 Asus TUF A15 was infamous for closed-off bottom vents for which the cooling pad didn't help. Check Jarrod Tech review for the same & other laptops where he tests thermals with a cooling pad. Temp reduction also matters on the laptop feet's height, which might block airflow a bit when kept on table.

I have Alienware m15 R1, shit default thermals, hits 100C easily. So I have put a CPU UV, CPU freq limit, CPU power limit & GPU UV. Even with these, I can see average temps of above 90C (92-93C) in certain games when laptop is on a table. But if I use a cooling pad or stand, avg temps drops to 85C or lower in the same game. I used Division 2 for extensive testing in 2019. These are avg. temps in a 30min+ session, max temps can still be 95C or 100C in the former case.

But I observed that a good stand at high enough angles is enough to get the same performance for cheap. Stand is also easier to carry, but using KB becomes uncomfortable.

Cooling pad I have - Deepcool Multicore X6
Stand - Basic foldable stand like this (not this model, some Portronic model)

Most gaming laptops have a good set of fans. So just get a stand for it, that has been my recommendation. Cooling pad reduces the idle temps a bit vs stand because of forced cooling, but gaming temps are similar or a bit worse on cooling pad in my testing (but 1-2C difference is within the margin of error).
Click to expand...
BTW that A15 video complaining about the closed vents was the most uninformed one. Someone else (I think on Reddit) sacrified a back cover by opening up the vents and found the air flow to be much worse. The engineers are not stupid to have come up with that design as the idea is to actually have a proper air flow from intake to exhaust and not to open up the back as much as possible to let in more dust.

BTW I have the A15 and cooling pads were not of much help as most interferred with the intake fans rather than helping out. Instead, I have flip stands installed to raise the back and apart from regular repasting, also added additional copper heatsinks for the CPU and GPU.
 
t3chg33k said:
BTW that A15 video complaining about the closed vents was the most uninformed one. Someone else (I think on Reddit) sacrified a back cover by opening up the vents and found the air flow to be much worse. The engineers are not stupid to have come up with that design as the idea is to actually have a proper air flow from intake to exhaust and not to open up the back as much as possible to let in more dust.

BTW I have the A15 and cooling pads were not of much help as most interferred with the intake fans rather than helping out. Instead, I have flip stands installed to raise the back and apart from regular repasting, also added additional copper heatsinks for the CPU and GPU.
Click to expand...
Check Hardware Unboxed's video on A15 2020 where they cut some vents on bottom panel (like those present on other laptops). They noticed higher VRM temps but they said Asus should have just used better VRMs instead of crippling general thermals for trying to cool VRM.
 
OMEGA44-XT said:
Check Hardware Unboxed's video on A15 2020 where they cut some vents on bottom panel (like those present on other laptops). They noticed higher VRM temps but they said Asus should have just used better VRMs instead of crippling general thermals for trying to cool VRM.
Click to expand...
Can't expect much from budget gaming laptops. Back then it was the only laptop with Zen 2 available in India at the time of Diwali.
 
t3chg33k said:
Can't expect much from budget gaming laptops. Back then it was the only laptop with Zen 2 available in India at the time of Diwali.
Click to expand...
I agree. So it was ok for lower end models with 1650 back then, thermally as well. But for 1660Ti or 2060, not so much. In next iteration they increased the bottom holes themselves & in 2022 they completely revamped it & made it much better.
 
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