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Forkjulle

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 1, 2012
211
1
At the store, I saw a laptop cooling fan that sits underneath the laptop. It raises the laptop off the table, a little, which is nice, but it has a little fan that blows upwards against the laptop.

Do these things make any difference to the Mac's heating / cooling? Is it a gimmick or worth the purcahse?
 

switon

macrumors 6502a
Sep 10, 2012
636
1
RE: laptop coolers...

Hi,

I have tried six different laptop coolers, both active and passive. Of course, it depends upon the ambient temperature of your room as to how much cooling you will get from these devices. It also depends upon the size and number of fans in the coolers, as they have anywhere from zero (like the passive cooler pads that absorb heat by "melting" crystals in a gel inside the pad), one 50mm fan, two 120mm fans, to one 220mm fan. I find that I get anywhere from 0-5C CPU cooling when using these devices compared to just the rMBP's fans alone when the machine is running under full CPU loads, at my air conditioned room temperatures.

Switon

P.S. Basically, I think Apple did a pretty fine job designing their cooling system including the algorithm for fan speed control, seeing as I don't find too much additional cooling using these laptop coolers. On the other hand, the ones that work the best appear to direct extra air into the vents of the rMBP, although the ones that work the best also direct a significant flow of air across the bottom of the rMBP too.
 
Last edited:

mrsir2009

macrumors 604
Sep 17, 2009
7,505
156
Melbourne, Australia
At the store, I saw a laptop cooling fan that sits underneath the laptop. It raises the laptop off the table, a little, which is nice, but it has a little fan that blows upwards against the laptop.

Do these things make any difference to the Mac's heating / cooling? Is it a gimmick or worth the purcahse?

They can, as they pull away the hot air that is hanging around the underside of the computer and replace it with cool air, therefore cooling the computer. If you want more information about laptop cooling pads scroll down to the bottom of this page :)
 
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