Gadgetory

we reviewed our fair share of gaming laptops here on Linus tech tips and while recent models have really tried to up the mobile gaming ante with features like 4k displays SLI and full-blown desktop class GPUs like the GTX 980 pushing the performance envelope so much means that heat management is a constant challenge and has always been so and many laptop coolers on the market can be pretty hit or miss however after we noticed the well-reviewed o polar L Co 5 on Amazon we wanted to put it to a test to see if this little guy could tame the fiery demons inside a couple of our high-end notebooks until skull Canyon nook features a 6th generation Core i7 processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more in the link of the video description down below most laptop cooling solutions out there today take the form of a pad that you sit your laptop on which cools things down with a series of USB powered fans on the inside the o polar L Co 5 takes a different approach though as it's a vaccum style CPU cooler which attaches to the side of your laptop and sucks additional air out giving the computer's built-in exhaust fans a boost o polar included a pretty solid attachment mechanism that includes an adjustable adhesive pad that sticks securely to the bottom of your laptop but it is a little bit difficult to remove due to the adhesive being so strong and a pair of string loaded arms that clamp the cooler into place there's a limit to how far these arms will go so they might not fit a really bulky laptop there are also three flexible shrouds to form a seal around the laptop vent I picked grey as the other two colors were grody nursing-home green and old person denture beige then lastly there's a squishy filter to keep out dust the cooler is clearly designed for notebooks with side air vents as you might have difficulty mounting it if you're only vents are on the back of your laptop just as heads-up the whole thing is powered via USB and includes four rubber feet just in case you have a thin laptop and the cooler makes it so that you couldn't balance it on a table otherwise the build quality isn't too bad with an unfortunately glossy black design with some silver accents around it and a ball bearing fan on the inside the cooler is controlled by the three buttons on top which are present for fan speed up fan speed down and a switch this which is between on automatic on manual and off the auto setting uses a temperature sensor to determine what speed to run it at while the manual setting allows you to pick from 1 to 13 different fan speeds may be a bit excessive but for those of you who really want that granular control I guess you might appreciate it but how does it actually perform to answer that question we used a pair of gaming notebooks first off was our new EVGA SC 17 laptop featuring an Intel Core i7 skylake mobile processor a 980m GPU yeah this thing can put out a lot of heat wind gaming especially on the bezel between the top of the keyboard and the monitor which can actually become kind of painful to touch due to the high heat levels so this laptop seemed to be a great candidate for some extra cooling we also tested our venom black book featuring a Haswell core i7 processor and a 970m graphics card much like the SC 17 the black book can get pretty hot both on the inside and to the touch so we were curious how the O polar would handle this smaller yet still very powerful laptop we use our crysis 3 skybox load test to heat up our GPU and our cpu for the SC 17 we ran the game at 4k at high settings and then for the black book we use 1080p resolution but cranked the settings up to very high we decided to first run the cooler all the way up to max just to see what it was capable of and while it was actually rather surprisingly awesome the results did vary on the SC 17 temperatures on our GPU and CPU only dropped three to four degrees Celsius and the front bezel was nearly the same scorching temperature however there was a much more noticeable difference on the smaller black book as our bezel temperature dropped around seven degrees Celsius and our CPU and GPU ran nine to ten degrees colder a very significant improvement after switching over to automatic mode the o polar did a nice job with recognizing when to kick things up a notch but again the results varied quite a bit between the two laptops it didn't seem to make a dent in the SE 17 temperature in fact the o polar results were similar to when we just used EVGA x' fan boost option that roughly doubled the speed of the built-in fans even when we combined the o polar with fan boost we only saw a 1 degree improvement on what we got using just you know fan boost however the old Polar's auto mode did cool off our black book a fair amount about 6 degrees on the bezel and 7 degrees on the GPU and a full 10 degrees on the CPU funnily enough the o polar did an unquestionably better job on the black book even though the black book CPU and GPU temperature is with default cooling were higher than those of the SC 17 well we can't say with complete certainty what's responsible for the huge difference in our results the smaller body of the venom black book may have meant there was a smaller volume of hot air for it to pull out which would benefit a lot or that the smaller space made it easier to apply pressure in order to pull the air out or it's quite likely that the SC 17 may have just had a more aggressive built in cooling solution for its higher end GPU and the O polar couldn't really supplement that very well so just like any random CPU cooler for your desktop your mileage may vary in terms of how you're using it and what you're using it for at 26 bucks on amazon.com the O polar L Co 5 is probably worth trying out if you have an average size to smaller laptop that always seems to be a little bit too hot for comfort especially if you like to take your games on the road tunnel bear is the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop it lets you tunnel to up to 20 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and use online websites and services as though you are in that different country there's also the anonymity of it they've got apps for iOS Android PC and Mac they've also got a Chrome extension and it's super easy to use you just pick your country in the app turn the tunnel bare switch on and watch as your bear tunnels your internet connection to your new location when you turn it on two things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption and that public IP address that website can see whenever you access them gets switched so you show up as though you're somewhere else and they fixed all the annoying parts of using a VPN for personal use there's no dns or port configurations or bad you just hit the switch boom it goes on and they give you 500 megabytes of data per month for free so you can try it out with no credit card required then if you want to upgrade by the way you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm /l tt we've got all those links in the video description thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but whose some get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at the Amazon if you want to buy a $26 cooler for your laptop I guess buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution to the forum you don't doing all that kind of stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click the little button in the top right hand corner to check out our fairly recent video on the SC 17 EVGA laptop that I just told you the thing that we cool kind of make sense