Testing:
Testing involved monitoring various temperatures on a laptop computer both with and without Thermaltake iXoft R15ON02 Notebook Cooling Pad in place. The test laptop computer is a Dell Inspiron with a 2GHz Intel processor, 1024MB PNY DDR memory, and 120GB Seagate Momentus hard drive.
The laptop was simply used in a somewhat day to day manner, with Thunderbird and Firefox both opened in order to copy and paste data from e-mails on to Bigbruin.com to populate the daily news updates. Nothing outrageous, but it is enough to get the system warmed up to a point where I wouldn't actually want it on my lap.
Speed Fan software was used to monitor the temperature of the processor (CPU), hard drive, and graphics processor (GPU), while external thermal probes were used to monitor the temperatures of greatest interest. One thermal probe was affixed to the base of the laptop, right on the plastic housing just outside where the CPU is contained. A second thermal probe was then affixed to the desktop directly below the first thermal probe.
In use, without the iXoft in place, these two thermal probes were nearly touching and were only separated by about 2mm of air thanks to the rubber feet on the base of the laptop. With the iXoft in place, they were separated by just the thickness of the iXoft, and were still located with one directly above the other. Two things were of interest to me with this arrangement... One, was the desktop going to be kept significantly cooler by the use of the iXoft pad. And two, was the laptop going to be kept cooler, or perhaps actually be warmer thanks to what seemed like the good insulative properties of the pad.
The chart below details the findings, and I was quite surprised by what I found. In fact, I monitored the thermal values three different times just to confirm the results shown below. The desktop was kept cooler, the base of the laptop was kept cooler, and each component being monitored internally also produced lower temperatures. Impressive and somewhat unexpected.
The Thermaltake iXoft is like a black hole for heat, making it pretty much disappear without the use of fans.
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