welcome to an unboxing and First Look in
standard definition wow it's like going back in
time so we're going to be having a look at the Zalman ZM NC 3500 plus now the
baby is sleeping so I do have to be quiet! I apologize for that but there's
not a whole lot I can do about it right now so this is a premium notebook cooler
with built-in two channel USB sound card and dual amplifiers it also has their
enhanced okay so that's pretty much stereo sound built stereo speakers a 4X
usb2 Hub and a 220 mm or 22 cm cooling
fan it supports notebooks up to 17 in now if you guys have a gaming okay you
know what let's finish with the Box first so enhanced stereo sound we got
that okay typical notebook we got that too maximum cooling performance and
ergonomic design cool this looks like most of the same stuff Dynamic airflow
design I don't think we've covered that o sound control
buttons on off mute volume down volume
up okay and so yeah if you guys have a gaming
notebook or you know anyone who has a gaming notebook what you probably know about them is that they run really hot
they tend to have big cooling fan well that's a small cooling fan but there's a
big cooling fan somewhere I think it's down here and there's the intakes
there's the exhausts big heat sinks and
especially if you run them on a carpet or on a bed or even on a table a lot of
the time they can run really really hot so what we're going to be doing is we're
going to be firing up a game on this MSI GX 660r we're going to fire it up on the
table and then we are going to use the
ZM NC 3500 plus to see if that improves
the temperatures of the CPU and the GPU
on this notebook so let's first get the unboxing out of the way so the sound of
Styrofoam very rarely wakes up babies
right all right that wasn't oh that was
worse okay that's great more
styrofoam and of course my notebook can
shut down correctly okay there we go
that's cool let's get the cooler
out all right so notebook cooler there's your 22 cm fan right there so it's
pretty big right this looks giving me the nod
it's pretty big okay so you got rubber grippies here here here here and here
now there's a reason that it's shaped like this number one is you got speakers
on either side there's your volume control right here onof mute down and up
other side not a whole lot at the back
you've got uh oh fan speed I was like
volume really again uh but it's not so PC there's your USB hub so that's sort
of feeding that and there's the power in which will give you powered USB and as
well as powering the uh ban potentially I guess I don't know
ah yes the angle so the angle is important on these things because that's
what actually makes it more ergonomic to use for
example slightly tilted down is more
comfortable to typon when you're sitting in front of it you can always adjust the
screen because it's a notebook and the screens usually fold on notebooks just
like this
okay so here is the laptop running on the table we're just taking an idle
reading right now so the CPU is anywhere from 48 to 51 Dees GPU is running at 47°
so we've got a log running on the real temp uh monitor for the quad course CPU
that's in this notebook and we're just going to go ahead and launch a game to
see what kind of temperatures we can generate in a real world sort of gaming
laptop type of load so as you can see I don't have a lot of games installed on
this particular particular computer out of all of these I think trying to is
probably the most demanding which is sort of pathetic but there you go steam
to oh come on are you kidding okay well we'll be
back so we've been running for a little while here that'll give us some idea of
what kind of temps we're dealing with so we're just going to alt Tab out really quick CPU is at around
60° and let's check out the GPU so GPU
peaked around 60 68° which actually
isn't that bad so let's go ahead and and
put on the notebook cooler um let's do it without the fan
first and let's see if running a
game we can actually get those temperatures to change it all so just
for for our own reference that was uh
like a don't worry that's from yesterday it's
not old a
pen this is actually a sweet pen because it has a light built into the other end
of it fire pen
okay so got one of my cards these are old cards you can tell because NC has
four locations we're up to like 11 now or
something so yeah that's that's an old card that I think one of these locations
doesn't even exist anymore uh the Richmond well no that's the right
Richmond one at least that's pretty good that's the only aine Mall these aren't
older than about maybe 3 years old so yeah 60 see this is like this is
how sort
of this is how professional we are okay so bear in mind guys I am not running
this with the fan on right now so we're just finding out if having it raised
having the mesh underneath the underneath the notebook is going to help
with the CPU and GPU temperatures versus having the notebook right up against the
table bearing in mind the table's already a pretty decent scenario for
your gaming notebook whereas if you're running it like um you know in bed or
something it would be great to have a stand like this keeping the sheets from
suffocating the F so um we'll be back in a second once we let it run for a little
bit okay so let's find out what kind of atts we're dealing with without the fan
running but with the not okay so we're
looking at now that's a couple degrees cooler on the CPU that's 58 degrees on
the hottest core and we actually
dropped no GPU looks like it's running about the same at 68 Dees so now what
we're going to do is we're going to fire the game back up okay get that running
again remember we're getting load temperatures here guys that's kind of the idea um because really you don't
need a notebook cooler if you're just going to be idling and oh are you
kidding me see these are high-profile plugs so what that means is that if your
USB ports are right next to each other that won't work so you're going to want
to go ahead and uh separate those out a little bit it's doable so we're going to
go ahead and do that I'm going to turn that fan right up to Max so uh there you
go you can see the fan is spinning now
although pretty quiet even at Max there's a bit of a tick there I wonder
what that's all about so we'll go ahead
and find out if the fan improves the
temperatures of our notebook and uh
yeah so this is the final test remember guys we were at about 60° on the CPU and
about 68° on the GPU we've left it running for another 5 minutes or so um
um and let's find out if the forced air cooling decreases the temperatures so it
looks like the room has actually gotten a little hotter because that's the only
explanation I can think of for why the GPU maxed out at 69 this time and the
CPU is running again at about 58° so
what it comes down to with this is if your laptop has adequate ventilation
already and you're not looking at a scenario where you're using it on a
carpet or on other sort of fabric surface sitting in bed this would be a
perfect thing to put on your lap but if you're just using your notebook on a
desk and you don't need the ergonomic advantage of having it tilted like this
then there's probably less of an advantage to a notebook cooler than you
might have actually thought now we're going to test the sound really quickly
here as well we'll be right back okay so basically after a after a
short test you know listening to some whoops oh eaz is that how you say that I
don't even know but at any rate um what we concluded is that the speakers built
into the notebook cooler are definitely louder than the ones built into this
particular notebook however uh maybe it's due to the fact that MSI
implemented their Dine Audio sound system with this particular notebook
which means it does actually have uh really good speakers compared to most
laptops U the sound quality was significantly better than the ones that
are built into the notebook cooler part of that could be not even to do with the
speakers that they're using or the sound chip set but just due to the way that
the speakers are covered by this uh by this plastic cap with only open ports
right here and right here I think that might be hampering them and and the
performance that they're delivering in some ways so thank you for checking out
my unboxing and first look at I see I don't remember the wrong number at the
zmnt 3500 plus from zelman don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips for more
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