we reviewed our fair share of gaming laptops here on lineus techtips and
while recent models have really tried to up the mobile gaming anti with features
like 4K displays SLI and full-blown
desktop class gpus like the gtx980
pushing the performance envelope so much means that heat management is a constant
Challenge and it has always been so and many laptop coolers on the market can be
pretty Hit or Miss however after we noticed the well-reviewed opolar lc05 on
Amazon on 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 Intel skull Canyon knck features a sixth generation core i7
processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more in the link in 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 opolar L5 takes a
different approach though as it's a vacuum style CPU Cooler which attaches
to the side of your laptop and sucks additional air out giving the computers
built in exhaust fans a boost opolar
included a pretty solid attachment mechanism that includes an adjustable
adhesive pad that sticks securely to the bottom of your laptop but 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 gray as
the other two colors were groy 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 says you might have difficulty
mounting it if your only vents are on the back of your laptop just at 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 that switches 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 maybe
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
sc17 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 blackbook
featuring a Haswell core i7 processor and a 970m graphics card much like the
sc7 the black book can get pretty hot both on the inside and to the touch so
we were curious how the polar would handle this smaller yet still very
powerful laptop we used our Crisis 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
blackbook we used 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 sc7 temperatures on our
GPU and CPU only dropped 3 to 4° C 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 7° cus and
our CPU and GPU ran 9 to 10° colder a
very significant Improvement after switching over to automatic mode the
opolar did a nice job with recognizing when to kick things up a notch but again
the results varied quite a bit between between the two laptops it didn't seem
to make a dent in the SC 17's temperature in fact the opolar results
were similar to when we just used evga's fan boost option that roughly doubled
the speed of the built-in fans even when we combined the opolar with fan boost we
only saw a one degree Improvement on
what we got using just you know fan boost however the opolar auto mode did
cool off our blackbook a fair amount about 6° on the bezel and 7° on the GPU
and a full 10° on the CPU funnily enough
the opolar did an unquestionably better job on the blackbook even though the
blackbook CPU and GPU temperatures with default cooling were higher than those
of the sc7 while we can't say with complete certainty what's responsible
for the huge difference in our results the smaller body of the Venom blackbook
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 sc17 may have
just had a more aggressive built-in cooling solution for its higher-end GPU
and the opolar 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 opolar
lc5 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
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10% by going to tunnel bear.com we've got all those links in the video
description thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider
supporting us directly L 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 now that
you're done 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 sc7 that EVGA
laptop that I just told you the thing that we cooled kind of makes sense