Tell your laptop to chill out with the Antec Notebook Cooler
Written: Aug 20 '08
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Effective, quiet, actually increases battery life
Cons: Rather heavy, needs a flat surface, blinding LED light
The Bottom Line: This cooling pad works extremely well with my laptop, and doesn't decrease the battery life. It seems sturdy, and is a great value.
|
|
|
| lucidlemur's Full Review: |
I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop that's been having some worrisome overheating problems. I used a Dell Inspiron for 5 years and can tell that the Toshiba gets significantly hotter, so I worried about damage to its components from overheating.
Cooling
If you don't know already, laptops get hot when they run, and this heat is not only uncomfortable on your lap, it can interfere with the computer's performance. In the short term, overheating can cause your system to crash (as mine was doing), while in the long term it can decrease your computer's life span.
In researching what was going on with my laptop, I read a few interesting things:
1. The quality of the internal heat sink can drastically affect cooling efficiency (strike one -- I have a budget laptop that I already know has heat sink problems).
2. AMD processors tend to run hotter than Intel ones (strike two, mine has AMD).
Figuring that I hadn't struck out yet, I decided to buy a laptop cooler. These usually use convection to cool your laptop by blowing circulating air across its surface. By far the cheapest available was the Antec USB-Powered Notebook Cooler, selling for $24.99 on Amazon.com. It had decent reviews, so I added it to my shopping cart, where it sat for a few weeks while I tried to figure out something else to buy so I could get the free shipping on orders over $25. Then suddenly it went on sale for $14.99 so I added some groceries to the order and bought it. (I felt pretty good about this price until I saw that a reviewer on epinions got it for $8. Grrrr. Still a good price, though!)
Product Details
The Antec Notebook Cooler uses a USB connection to draw power to run two fans (it has a pass-through connector so you don't lose a USB port). The cord is just long enough to reach USB ports of either side of the computer, and it stows in a compartment under the pad when not in use.
This pad has an aluminum top over a black plastic body. There are two fan speeds, high and low (about 1350 and 1800 rpm), and a blue LED to indicate when the pad is plugged in. The fans draw air away from the laptop, which makes more sense to me than blowing air toward it. That seems more likely to sent dust directly into the laptop's fans, and I already have problems with that!
I'll put the full specs at the bottom of the review, but basically this cooler is slightly smaller than my 15.4" laptop. If your laptop's feet don't fit on the pad, it's okay, since the pad comes with four small separators you can attach to create an air gap. At 1.6 lbs, the notebook cooler is light enough to be comfortable on my lap, but not so light that I'd want to carry it around a lot.
A nice touch is that this pad comes with a 3-year warranty, which is much longer than most other electronic products. Yay for standing behind your product!
Power Drain
I was expecting a significant decrease in my laptop's already pitiful battery life due to the cooling pad drawing power for the fans. Fortunately, I received this pad just as I was just about to run a simulation using some environmental modeling software, which would require my laptop to be on for hours. So I tested to see how quickly the laptop went from 100% to 50% battery charge with different fan settings. I won't bore you with the details, but I averaged the times with the following results:
No cooling pad: 34.2 minutes
Fans on low: 35.1 minutes
Fans on high: 34.8 minutes
Contrary to what I expected, it turns out the battery went down to 50% fastest without using the pad. From these results, at least, it looks like the cooling effect is enough to offset the power draw, so if anything there's a slight improvement in battery life.
One more note about power: although the pass-through feature is nice, be careful about connecting a USB device that draws power into the cooling pad connector. Since the pad requires up to 0.45 A (2.25 W), you can't use a device that requires more than 0.1 A or 0.5 W in the same port.
Effectiveness
I don't have a good way of measuring my laptop's temperature directly, so I can't provide numbers to back up my assessment. But this pad has a very clear effect on temperature. After an hour or two, the back of my laptop used to get uncomfortably hot to the touch. Now, I can use it for hours and it barely gets warm.
Functionality
Having established that this cooling pad does its job very well, there are a couple of problems with its design. One drawback that I hadn't anticipated was that the pad has to be set on a firm, level surface. I often use my laptop on, well, my lap, so this is a bit difficult. The way I handle it right now is I have the pad set on top of a wire rack (like the kind you cool cookies on), which I then set on my lap. This allows for air circulation and is quite comfortable.
The blue LED light is almost blinding, as I discovered while peering underneath the laptop to change the fan setting. ("Wow! That was unnecessary," I thought, as my eyes watered. "I'll have to remember to tape over that ridiculous thing.") I suppose in a pinch it would make a good flashlight.
On the positive side, the 25 dB fans are really very quiet, and the power cord is just the right length to reach the USB ports without getting tangled. It's a nice touch that it stows inside the pad, too.
Recommendations
For $14.99, this notebook cooler is a great value. It appears sturdy, and has worked well for me during a few days of nearly constant laptop use. I saw immediate benefits from its use, and no significant drawbacks. I'd give it 4.5 stars if I could, but because it has such a long warranty and is such a good value I'm going to go with 5.
Specs
size: 13"x11.2"x0.8"
weight: 1.6 lb
USB power cable length: 15"
voltage: 5v DC
current (low speed - high speed) : 0.31 - 0.45
power consumption: 1.55 W - 2.25 W
fans: two
average fan speed: 1350 - 1800 rpm
airflow: 8.5 - 13 ft^3 per minute
noise level: 23 - 27 dB
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
lucidlemur
|
|
Member: Mic
Location: Pacific Northwest
Reviews written: 55
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
School has started!
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.