Chill Mat

[cabinetman]

LOML surprised me with a new "Chill Mat", for my laptop. It claims 28% more cooling, and I'll bet it's at least that. It really moves some air. The fans are much larger than my old one. Maybe it draws less power, or the extra cooling, but my laptop seems to be faster.
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[lebomike]

Cman,
How loud are the fans?

Mike

[leehljp]

A co-worker has one similar and likes it. He has had it for about a year. I don't know if it is that one or another Japanese brand. It works off of the USB port.

[LCHIEN]

I have to admit I've not used or tried one of these. But the engineering would seem to be against much practical advantage.

1st the USB port can supply up to 500 mA of power at 5V - 2.5 Watts. That's a siginficant amount and wil certainly reduce the battery operating time and n addition, the 5V must be regulated for the USB port so there is an additional power loss. Most laptop chargers these days seem to be 90W units so laptop use is probably around 50-70 watts. 2.5 additional watts is 5% or so???

2nd the fan location shown is set so it would blow in the center of your laptop's base. Yes, the bottom does get warm but the majority of a laptops heat nowadays goes thru the fan port - if you look carefully at your laptop there will be one or two openings where the air blows out - often you can see a fan or heatsink (finned aluminum thing) at these ports. This is where the real heat gets transferred. If the cool pad helped blow more air into these ports then it might help.

Because every laptop is different, I would think the local temp on the bottom would be reduced, but there's no major benefit to the cooling ports. It will just use more laptop power and running cooler will not make it run faster or better that you could tell. I know many PC's switch to faster rates when the AC power is detected but none that switch to faster operation if a lower temperature is detected. Speed is regulated by Crystal oscillators, so temperature change would only make speed differences in the crystal frequency shift of .0001% or so.

This is one of those things that makes the bottom feel cooler to the touch, but doesn't do much for the PC, but makes the user feel better because he can feel a difference.

Just my educated opinion.

[cabinetman]

I have to admit I've not used or tried one of these. But the engineering would seem to be against much practical advantage.

Because every laptop is different, I would think the local temp on the bottom would be reduced, but there's no major benefit to the cooling ports. It will just use more laptop power and running cooler will not make it run faster or better that you could tell. I know many PC's switch to faster rates when the AC power is detected but none that switch to faster operation if a lower temperature is detected. Speed is regulated by Crystal oscillators, so temperature change would only make speed differences in the crystal frequency shift of .0001% or so.

This is one of those things that makes the bottom feel cooler to the touch, but doesn't do much for the PC, but makes the user feel better because he can feel a difference.

Just my educated opinion.

Since I do run the laptop on AC I would think that the heat generated could affect performance. Without the additional fans, it gets hot as heck. From my understanding, a crystal's frequency characteristic depends on the shape or 'cut' of the crystal. A tuning fork crystal is usually cut such that its frequency over temperature is a parabolic curve centered around 25 °C. This means that a tuning fork crystal oscillator will resonate close to its target frequency at room temperature, but will slow down when the temperature either increases or decreases from room temperature. A common parabolic coefficient for a 32 kHz tuning fork crystal is −0.04 ppm/°C².

f = f_0[1-0.04 \ \mbox{ppm}(T-T_0)^2]

In a real application, this means that a clock built using a regular 32 kHz tuning fork crystal will keep good time at room temperature, lose 2 minutes per year at 10 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature and lose 8 minutes per year at 20 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature due to the quartz crystal. This may account for some differential greater than .0001%.
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[LCHIEN]

Since I do run the laptop on AC I would think that the heat generated could affect performance. Without the additional fans, it gets hot as heck. From my understanding, a crystal's frequency characteristic depends on the shape or 'cut' of the crystal. A tuning fork crystal is usually cut such that its frequency over temperature is a parabolic curve centered around 25 °C. This means that a tuning fork crystal oscillator will resonate close to its target frequency at room temperature, but will slow down when the temperature either increases or decreases from room temperature. A common parabolic coefficient for a 32 kHz tuning fork crystal is −0.04 ppm/°C².

f = f_0[1-0.04 \ \mbox{ppm}(T-T_0)^2]

In a real application, this means that a clock built using a regular 32 kHz tuning fork crystal will keep good time at room temperature, lose 2 minutes per year at 10 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature and lose 8 minutes per year at 20 degrees Celsius above (or below) room temperature due to the quartz crystal. This may account for some differential greater than .0001%.
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still if your PC ran oh so fast at 25C and slower by even 1% at 45C then I'm saying you could not noticably detect a 1% speed change in computing.
Crsytals change but only by very small sub-sub-percent amounts.

[conwaygolfer]

Chill Mat

WOW - after reading the posts and reply's by Cabinetman and LCHIEN, I feel like I must have slept thru school. My math teacher failed me one year and now I know why. I guess when God handed out brains, I must have been daydreaming or something. Probably told Him that I had all I needed.
Now I also know why I stand by the K.I.S.S. system. Cause my brain can't comprehend anything past 2+2.

People like you two do all the thinking, while the rest of us just spend our money.
I can hit a golf ball mostly where I want it to go and not sure how it got there, but I bet you two can tell me exactly what happened to make it happen.
Hoping you take this in the context I intended.


Conwaygolfer