Beast cooling solution for your gaming laptop? - Opolar LC05 Laptop Cooler Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,471 words · ~7 min read
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we reviewed our fair share of gaming laptops here on lineus techtips and
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while recent models have really tried to up the mobile gaming anti with features
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like 4K displays SLI and full-blown
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desktop class gpus like the gtx980
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pushing the performance envelope so much means that heat management is a constant
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Challenge and it has always been so and many laptop coolers on the market can be
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pretty Hit or Miss however after we noticed the well-reviewed opolar lc05 on
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Amazon on we wanted to put it to a test to see if this little guy could tame the
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fiery Demons Inside a couple of our high-end
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notebooks Intel skull Canyon knck features a sixth generation core i7
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processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more in the link in the video description
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down below most laptop cooling solutions
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out there today take the form of a pad that you sit your laptop on which cools
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things down with a series of USB powered fans on the inside the opolar L5 takes a
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different approach though as it's a vacuum style CPU Cooler which attaches
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to the side of your laptop and sucks additional air out giving the computers
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built in exhaust fans a boost opolar
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included a pretty solid attachment mechanism that includes an adjustable
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adhesive pad that sticks securely to the bottom of your laptop but is a little
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bit difficult to remove due to the adhesive being so strong and a pair of
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string-- loaded arms that clamp the cooler into place there's a limit to how
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far these arms will go so they might not fit a really bulky laptop there are also
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three flexible shrouds to form a seal around the laptop vent I picked gray as
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the other two colors were groy Nursing Home Green and old person denture beige
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then lastly there's a squishy filter to keep out dust the cooler is clearly
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designed for notebooks with side air vents says you might have difficulty
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mounting it if your only vents are on the back of your laptop just at heads up
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the whole thing is powered via USB and includes four rubber feet just in case
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you have a thin laptop and the cooler makes it so that you couldn't balance it
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on a table otherwise the build quality isn't too bad with an unfortunately
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glossy black design with some silver accents around it and a ball bearing fan
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on the inside the cooler is controlled by the three buttons on top which are
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present for fan speed up fan speed down
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and a switch that switches between on automatic on manual and off the auto
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setting uses a temperature sensor to determine what speed to run it at while
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the manual setting allows you to pick from 1 to 13 different fan speeds maybe
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a bit excessive but for those of you who really want that granular control I
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guess you might appreciate it but how does it actually perform to answer that
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question we used a pair of gaming notebooks first off was our new EVGA
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sc17 laptop featuring an Intel Core i7
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Skylake mobile processor a 980m
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GPU yeah this thing can put out a lot of heat wind gaming especially on the bezel
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between the top of the keyboard and the monitor which can actually become kind
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of painful to touch due to the high heat levels so this laptop seemed to be a
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great candidate for some extra cooling we also tested our Venom blackbook
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featuring a Haswell core i7 processor and a 970m graphics card much like the
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sc7 the black book can get pretty hot both on the inside and to the touch so
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we were curious how the polar would handle this smaller yet still very
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powerful laptop we used our Crisis 3 Skybox load test to heat up our GPU and
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our CPU for the SC 17 we ran the game at 4K at high settings and then for the
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blackbook we used 1080p resolution but cranked the settings up to very high we
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decided to first run the cooler all the way up to Max just to see what it was
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capable of and while it was actually rather surprisingly awesome the results
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did vary on the sc7 temperatures on our
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GPU and CPU only dropped 3 to 4° C and
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the front bezel was nearly the same scorching temperature however there was
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a much more noticeable difference on the smaller black book as our bezel
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temperature dropped around 7° cus and
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our CPU and GPU ran 9 to 10° colder a
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very significant Improvement after switching over to automatic mode the
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opolar did a nice job with recognizing when to kick things up a notch but again
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the results varied quite a bit between between the two laptops it didn't seem
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to make a dent in the SC 17's temperature in fact the opolar results
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were similar to when we just used evga's fan boost option that roughly doubled
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the speed of the built-in fans even when we combined the opolar with fan boost we
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only saw a one degree Improvement on
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what we got using just you know fan boost however the opolar auto mode did
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cool off our blackbook a fair amount about 6° on the bezel and 7° on the GPU
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and a full 10° on the CPU funnily enough
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the opolar did an unquestionably better job on the blackbook even though the
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blackbook CPU and GPU temperatures with default cooling were higher than those
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of the sc7 while we can't say with complete certainty what's responsible
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for the huge difference in our results the smaller body of the Venom blackbook
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may have meant there was a smaller volume of hot air for it to pull out
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which would benefit a lot or that the smaller space made it easier to apply
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pressure in order to pull the air out or it's quite likely that the sc17 may have
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just had a more aggressive built-in cooling solution for its higher-end GPU
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and the opolar couldn't really supplement that very well so just like
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any random CPU Cooler for your desktop your mileage may vary in terms of how
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you're using it and what you're using it for at 26 bucks on amazon.com the opolar
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lc5 is probably worth trying out if you have an average size to smaller laptop
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that always seems to be a little bit too hot for Comfort especially if you like
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to take your games on the road tunnel bear is the easy to usee VPN
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app for mobile and desktop it lets you tunnel to up to 20 different countries
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allowing you to browse the internet and use online websites and services as
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though you are in that different country there's also the anonymity of it they've
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got apps for iOS Android PC and Mac
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they've also got a Chrome extension and it's super easy to use you just pick
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your country in the app turn the tunnel bear switch on and watch as your bear
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tunnels your internet connection to your new location when you turn it on two
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things happen your connection gets encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption
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and that public IP address that websites can see whenever you access them gets
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switched so you show up as though you're somewhere else and they fixed all the
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annoying parts of using a VPN for personal use there's no DNS or Port
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configurations or blah blah blah you just hit the switch boom it goes on and
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they give you 500 megabytes of data per month for free so you can try it out
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with no credit card required then if you want to upgrade by the way you can save
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10% by going to tunnel bear.com we've got all those links in the video
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description thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
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but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider
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supporting us directly L by using our affiliate code to shop at the Amazon if
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you want to buy a $26 cooler for your laptop I guess buying a cool t-shirt
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like this one or with a direct monthly contribution to the Forum now that
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you're done doing all that kind of stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click the little button in the
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top right hand corner to check out our fairly recent video on the sc7 that EVGA
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laptop that I just told you the thing that we cooled kind of makes sense