Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed in today's view having a bit of fun with a product that I bought off eBay using my own hard-earned cash it's they lead up to send to this thing has been sitting on my desk for a few months just tempting me to test it and I finally got around to it this week and there's a bit of a story to it so back in May a member of our wonderful discord community for patreon members messaged me asking to test an external laptop cooler it was a while back can't find the exact message but they wanted me to see whether a $15 plastic box with a crappy fan inside can actually improve the cooling performance of a laptop and they linked me to this eBay page now as you can see the listing is for a mini vacuum air extracting USB cooling pad cooler fan for PC notebook laptop you can buy them brand-new with free shipping for just 15 Australian dollars which for our American viewers is about $10 and I'm sure there are equivalent products over there the sellers name of course gave me a lot of confidence who wouldn't trust qcq CBJ 2018 with 98.9% positive feedback rating the main image for the listing shows that the red lightning coming out of your PC will be turned into blue lightning through the magic of this cooling box one of the images does show the cooler increasing the noise levels in the room which I found a bit strange it's also easy to install it has high-speed air flow sufficient airflow for gaming and supposedly provides better heat displacement better yet it's low noise and will not influence its life by dust and you can sleep right next to me to go into a picture as well as for specs there's a 75 millimetre fan inside and spins between 1500 and 3000 rpm depending on what you set it pushes up to 75 point 3 5 CFM of air and consumes 1.75 watts of power and this is the actual product that arrived as you can see it's an ice troll game and notebook cooling equipment there's a bunch of Chinese writing on the box that I can't read on the back is a breakdown of all the key points I've just been talking about including the game radiation weapon and highlight mirror that it provides so let's take a look inside the box itself yeah look you get a whole bunch of stuff in here we'll talk about this stuff in in just a moment but this itself is the the unit itself I guess you have to say it's really ugly it's chunky it's made of really crap plastic we'll take a look at that more in just a moment then you'll also get these three blue rubbers which I guess protect against cooler disease and also ensure no air leakage there's also a USB power cable a plastic attachment finger which I think is still in the Box here and a few bits and pieces including a manual and some other stuff so yeah now let's talk a bit about installing this unit to a laptop it was suggested to me that I should test this cooler with a thin and light machine that may have weak cooling that throttles the components problem if that is almost no modern thinner light machines are compatible with this style of cooler the idea here is that you put the cooler next to the fan exhaust vent on your laptop pretty much straight on it except with Mon Ultra portables there is no fan vent that's actually accessible my daily driver is an LG gram and this laptops fan exhaust is built into the hinge it's the same case with the Dell XPS 13 and 15 razor blade stealth HP Spectre Lion Lenovo yoga devices most of su sin books I mean I really could go on here the one exception I could find is the Lenovo ThinkPad X series but it's a rare option among many with hinge vents in any case I don't have any thin laptops on hand that I can test with this sort of cooler hinge vents are also common for many gaming laptops it's not as common but it's still a widely used option razor's blade line and gigabytes error 15 are two examples that rely on hinge ventilation of the laptops that don't exhaust air in this manner usually there are multiple vents on the sides and rear of the body so this cooler can only be applied to one vent the laptop I use for testing is the msi ge70 5 which has four vents two on the rear and one on each side the left-hand ports are for the CPU cooling fan and the right-hand ports are for the GPU cooler which operate independently and vary their output depending on how the components are used i tried this cooler on all the vents but i'll let you know which I used when I get to the testing results the installation process for the cooler is a little strange the flap that attaches to the cooler comes with adhesive which you're supposed to stick to the underside of your laptop but I'm not sure why you would do this sure you wouldn't want to keep the cooler permanently attached especially as its massive and ungainly it seems like a very weird way to keep it secure anyway I'm sure you're all eating to know whether this thing actually works let's work through the results starting with some CPU testing in handbrake the basics to know he is that I attached the cooler to the left side vent which exhausts air from the CPU side of the core I then ran two configurations without the cooler both the default auto fan mode for the laptop and a quiet mode which would put the fans into the lowest speed MSI would allow I then tested both of these modes also with the cooler which itself was set to one of two modes either the minimum fan speed or the maximum fan speed as set through the dial on the unit itself I measured the CPU temperature the noise output and the average performance throughout the benchmark without the cooler the CPU did run hot reaching 90 degrees Celsius under load with the default fan speed or 95 C with the quiet fan speed noise levels were also quite high at 47.7 DBA for the default speed which was 5 degrees cooler than the quieter 43 DBA fan mode performance in either of these modes was roughly the same slightly faster with the louder fans but not significantly so using the cooler wasn't really all that helpful with fan set to the auto mode and the cooler set to its minimum fan speed the best I was able to achieve was a 1 degree temperature reduction for a 1 DBA increase to noise and then with fan set to maximum a 3 degree reduction for a huge jump in noise output to 51.7 DBA performance in both situation was pretty much unchanged it wasn't much better with the fan set to quiet using the cooler with the minimum fan speed reduced temperatures by 3 degrees burro's altered in a 3 DB a increased to noise and then with fan set to maximum the internal laptop fans were drowned out by the noisy cooler which only improved temperatures by 5 degrees the thing I noticed immediately about these results is that if you're after a quiet air experience this coolant really isn't providing it increasing the fan speeds of the laptop itself was more effective at cooling the CPU and resulted in about the same increase to noise as using this external cooler achieving just a minimum noise output of 47 DBA with the cooler still made the laptop quiet loud so this isn't ideal for say quieting down your laptop and running at a lower temperature but also making the fans a bit quieter it also really has no impact on performance this is because the CPU itself isn't throttling in any of these conditions tested here as you'd expect from a good laptop cooler design of course so to further stress test the system and see whether it has any benefit in more constraint scenarios I decided to block the other exhaust vent so that all air was forced out the single vent with the cooler attached in this situation with fan speeds still set to auto there was a three degree increase to temperatures but still no throttling using the external cooler with the fence being set to maximum resulted in a two degree temperature reduction which is pretty pathetic to be honest there was also no change to performance so I decided to stress the system out more and really get this thing throttling I did that by increasing the ambient room temperature from 21 degree Celsius the standard for our testing to a hot Australian summer day of 40 degrees Celsius with one vent still blocked the system did throttle under Auto fan speeds with the CPU cooking at 95 degrees Celsius performance only dropped by 7% but a drop is still a drawn at the cooler into the mix and well there was no difference to CPU temperatures in fact the laptop was still throttling at 95 degrees but performance did improve rather than a 7% reduction to throttling the system was now running by just 4% again I guess a rather unimpressive result so with all that testing done I thought maybe this cooler would help with GPU temperatures so I shifted it over to the back right vent and used the same testing method auto and quiet fan speeds under default conditions the laptop was a bit louder with all fans running this time and the difference in GP temperatures was 4 degrees between auto and quiet fan speeds for the same in-game performance focusing on the quiet fan speeds now using the external cooler laughably actually did nothing to affect performance in fact running at the coolest minimum fan speed GPU temperatures identical and noise output increased by two DBA so that's pretty useless cranking the fans up to maximum decrease the GPU temperature by a measly one degree while increasing noise output significantly all for no change in game performance hilariously I discovered that rather than using the cooler for its intended purpose if you use the cooler to raise the base of your laptop GPU temperatures dropped by three degrees so the cooler is more effective as a basic laptop stand than as an actual cooler and I guess that just goes to show how rubbish this sort of product is so after these results I guess the question you have to ask is why doesn't this product work it seems like it does increase the airflow the fans speed up like crazy and appears to shoot out the fair bit more air through this vent than the laptops offense itself but why doesn't this have a meaningful impact of performance well there are several possible explanations one is that the additional air being sucked through the cooler isn't actually passing through the heatsink so isn't impacting temperatures this could be due to an imperfect seal between cooler and laptop or between our laptops outer plastic and the internal heatsink which would allow air to be drawn through other sources the other explanation is simply down to what happens when you place two fans in series remember in this system we also have a fan inside the laptop itself pushing air through the heatsink which then goes into the second external fan in these scenarios generally speaking the air flow does not increase but instead the pressure increases if there's not much resistance in the system the added pressure from the second fan won't improve growing performance significantly these systems tend to be a bit more complicated than that so it's a very simplified exploration but basically placing another fan in series with an existing fan isn't necessarily going to improve performance unless there's an air flow resistance issue which for this laptop and presumably many others isn't really the case after all gaming laptops these days tend to have optimized and well designed interiors to squeeze as much cooling performance out of a small design as possible so really this sort of external cooling product is just a big load of crap and really isn't worth the 15 dollars that I paid for it definitely wouldn't recommend this to really anyone if you do have a laptop that's running hot what recommendation I often make is simply to raise the base slightly of your desk this can lower the intake air resistance but more importantly can also lower the intake air temperature as it isn't sucking air through a narrow channel under your laptop past a typically hot underside on its way to the fan laptop cooling pads work through a similar principle but can add additional cooling due to parallel fans and the ability to directly cool the underside of your laptop where the heat sinks normally pass over there not a great option but they're certainly much better than this sort of rubbish so yeah really that's my thoughts on this laptop cooler thing really not sure what I'll do with it now I certainly won't be using it to cool any laptops maybe I'll just point it at my face or something during the the hot summer months here or just throw it in the bin where this sort of thing really belongs subscribe for more content consider supporting us on patreon and I'll catch you in the next one