Hey all,
I stumbled across a cooling solution that seems to work well. The irony is in it's simplicity
As I'm sure you are all aware, excessive heat shortens the life of your computer. Cooling is the key. I play occasional video games, and do a lot of audio/video editing routinely. My laptop is my work horse for pleasure and business. On the business side of things, it's my breadwinner. I have to take care of it.
For years, I've been intermittently trying different cooling pads, and laptop stands with unsatisfactory results. Even the Targus Coolmat, designed for the MBP, only kept the unit a few degrees cooler. I thought my expectations were too high as my goal was to keep the laptop so cool that the fan did not spin up, or hardly at all. Since I could not accomplish this, i'd cap the fps at 30 or run games with the 9400 chip. This worked fine except it seemed like a waste to pay for the processing power only to not use it.
Noticing how hot my desk got while gaming (I could feel the heat by touching the underside of the desk), I first decided to raise the laptop off the desk and expose it to as much air as possible. I found a cheap $10 stand which was scissor-like with four supports on each leg. Almost all of the laptop is suspended in the air except for the four small contact points. It is off the table 1/2 cm in the front, and about 5 cm in the back where most of the heat is. Simple.
The second part to the equation is to help dissipate the air that's heating up underneath the laptop. The problem with notepad lap coolers is that they intake warm air from around the laptop, then blow it up flat against the surface of the bottom in a perpendicular, non-aerodynamic way. Secondly, the fans are often too small, and are underpowered via USB voltage. We need something more powerful.
When it is hot outside, we similarly use fans to cool our living spaces. If we take a fan, put it in the same room and have it blow towards us it provides marginal cooling. If we put that fan in the window and blow the cooler air in, it's much more efficient. However, if we open the front door and back door, and the air is blown front to back, it works incredibly well.
What we need to do is to create something like an air tunnel. Find a quiet AC powered desktop fan and place it on the side of your desk so that it blows cool air from one side of your laptop out the other side (left to right or vice versa). I had a quiet column house fan which is working for me at the moment. Not only does this wind-tunnel method efficiently remove the heat from underneath the laptop, but also the heat on top of the laptop between the screen and the keyboard. Nice!
Ever since I set this up, my laptop fan has hardly come on, even while running games at max FPS using the 9600 chip.
Hopefully someone finds this useful.
I stumbled across a cooling solution that seems to work well. The irony is in it's simplicity
As I'm sure you are all aware, excessive heat shortens the life of your computer. Cooling is the key. I play occasional video games, and do a lot of audio/video editing routinely. My laptop is my work horse for pleasure and business. On the business side of things, it's my breadwinner. I have to take care of it.
For years, I've been intermittently trying different cooling pads, and laptop stands with unsatisfactory results. Even the Targus Coolmat, designed for the MBP, only kept the unit a few degrees cooler. I thought my expectations were too high as my goal was to keep the laptop so cool that the fan did not spin up, or hardly at all. Since I could not accomplish this, i'd cap the fps at 30 or run games with the 9400 chip. This worked fine except it seemed like a waste to pay for the processing power only to not use it.
Noticing how hot my desk got while gaming (I could feel the heat by touching the underside of the desk), I first decided to raise the laptop off the desk and expose it to as much air as possible. I found a cheap $10 stand which was scissor-like with four supports on each leg. Almost all of the laptop is suspended in the air except for the four small contact points. It is off the table 1/2 cm in the front, and about 5 cm in the back where most of the heat is. Simple.
The second part to the equation is to help dissipate the air that's heating up underneath the laptop. The problem with notepad lap coolers is that they intake warm air from around the laptop, then blow it up flat against the surface of the bottom in a perpendicular, non-aerodynamic way. Secondly, the fans are often too small, and are underpowered via USB voltage. We need something more powerful.
When it is hot outside, we similarly use fans to cool our living spaces. If we take a fan, put it in the same room and have it blow towards us it provides marginal cooling. If we put that fan in the window and blow the cooler air in, it's much more efficient. However, if we open the front door and back door, and the air is blown front to back, it works incredibly well.
What we need to do is to create something like an air tunnel. Find a quiet AC powered desktop fan and place it on the side of your desk so that it blows cool air from one side of your laptop out the other side (left to right or vice versa). I had a quiet column house fan which is working for me at the moment. Not only does this wind-tunnel method efficiently remove the heat from underneath the laptop, but also the heat on top of the laptop between the screen and the keyboard. Nice!
Ever since I set this up, my laptop fan has hardly come on, even while running games at max FPS using the 9600 chip.
Hopefully someone finds this useful.
