I’ve been researching the best laptop cooling pad for the past few days because I need one to keep my laptop temperatures under control during long work and gaming sessions. I’ve read several reviews and narrowed my options down to these two:
llano V12 Ultra Laptop Cooling Pad with Smart Software Control Laptop Fan:
However, I’m having trouble deciding which one would best suit my needs and would really appreciate your advice. I mainly want something that provides effective cooling, doesn’t get too noisy, and works well during demanding tasks.
Which one would you recommend for everyday use, and why? Any recommendations or long-term experience would be greatly appreciated.
Under heavy load (whether from SketchUp or something else) the CPU and GPU in your computer get hot. To protect them from being destroyed the system must limit how hot they are allowed to get. In a laptop with fans, the fan speed will increase. But if the temperature continues to rise, the system will slow the processors down to reduce the amount of heat they are producing, and may even shut down if it still continues to rise.
A portion of the heat is also dissipated through the case, and that is where a cooling pad can help, particularly in a laptop without fans. But because the case is not an especially efficient heat sink, the benefit is limited. I have a fan pad under my MacBook Pro, and it rarely makes much difference. The only way to tell in your specific situation is to try it and see what happens. Get a temperature monitoring utility and watch what the actual interior temperature (vs the outer case temperature) is doing.
That said, my experience has been that the best way both to improve performance and avoid heating is to reduce the workload by simplifying the SketchUp model. There are plenty of examples in which even without overheating, the amount of processing for a very heavy model will cause SketchUp to become sluggish. I see overheating more often when an extension undertakes a very complex operation.
Processor performance is only reduced when it gets so hot that the clock speed is throttled. The threshold for this varies depending on the processor model, but for current laptop processors it’s quite high, around 100°C. To find out if the clock speed is being throttled, you should monitor both the temperature and the clock frequency.
SSDs also contribute to the system’s overall performance (in SketchUp mainly when opening, loading, or saving files) and their performance is also reduced if they get too hot. You could check this as well. The temperature threshold here is usually significantly lower (depending on the model).
I ran my office on good graphics notebooks ( Sony Viao, Gigabyte ), Sketchup was not an issue with Notebook performance on Windows with an i7, 16GB and Nvidia GTX dedicated graphics card, nevertheless I did have a cooling pad (for gaming and realtime rendering (early Twinmotion )) , my production files (Masterplans, high rise towers) even for the biggest projects rarely exceeded 100MB good model housekeeping.