Review Item...........................: Zither Laptop Cooler
Supplied By............................: Evercool
When EverCool contacted us with gadgets I always get a little excited. I don't know why really, but as a company they produce gadgets or accessories that you dont realise you need. Sometimes they are obvious solutions, sometimes a retake on something else. This time one of the items first taken out the box of goodies that arrived was a laptop cooler.
I looked at it, thought about it, showed it to some work associates and some said it wont work. Its pointless or wont be effective enough, and one said laptops are designed to be cool as they are it wont be needed and wont make a difference. The more I thought about it the more I realised the cooler a laptop is, the more battery life you can get from it. Yes the laptop does cool itself, but its a heat pipe in a small space and most times it is not overly efficient. At best you still get bouts of heat from the exhaust, warm keyboards on some Toshiba models, or you can warm your lunch up on the heat from them as I have done on a few occasions. (Sausage Sandwich heated on a HP)
We have five laptops at work, the HP used to be the hottest, now the new Sony Vaio CR11 is the heating for the entire building. As a side note if your thinking of buying one, DONT, they are AWFUL for a Sony. So we use them everyday, they are titled the 'Crash Machines' and we abuse them, and I am not joking we install and uninstall tons on them, use them for our job and use them for gaming, webservers and a host of other things at work. Most of the time they are in a worse state than a customers computer with no AV protection. In essence, we use them for a host of testing. It shows!
So to think about cooling them never crossed any of our minds, even though we have looked at laptop coolers in the past. The new review monkey was unleashed with a laptop and off we set about testing the cooler with a hot laptop and a laser thermometer. The laptop in normal use, general email, web surfing and online facilities gave a temperature of 40 degrees sat on a desk alone. This was recorded after it had been running for some time and allowed to sit on a normal flat desk. This was important, it had to be flat and also have no interference from anything on the table, a completely open space on its own.
Now 40 degrees doesnt sound like a lot, but the amount of air contained in a laptop is a lot less than a desktop. A normal desktop can have 4 cubic feet of air in it, meaning it can take more ambient heat. A laptop has barely 4 cubic inches on some models of air, so airflow is critical. Its the actual life of the system, the battery and the components. The heatpipe technology with heatsinks does work albeit not always effectively, and most times without copper heatsinks. So the air flow is low, the heatsink material is not always optimised and the result is the 40 degree or so lunch warmer we find on the exhaust.
The introduction of the laptop cooler raised the laptop off the desk, interestingly at this point we didnt switch the unit on. We only ran it off so gauge how good the unit is at cooling with and without the fans running. The addition of the unit raising the laptop from the desk by an inch or so it added, helped a great deal. The temperature came down by 4-5 degrees fleeting the readout on the laser thermometer between 35 and 36 degrees. Which is rather simple and respectable. So the simple act of raising a laptop helps it breath more easily and also makes you wonder why the manufacturers dont add slightly higher feet to a laptop to help airflow anyway.
The cooler powered up and running made a further difference to the cooling situation. The soft blue glow looked stylish and somewhat fun while also blowing cold air from the back of the system down and back to the laptop also spreading the air out in a radial pattern. In theory it should blow to almost all of the base of a laptop which will help. But looking at all the laptops we have here, some have air vents to feed the fans on the bottom, those types of laptop will get a better result from a powered cooler than those with only cold air blowing over the base. Dont get me wrong it all helps, but for greater effect the air feed for the laptop fan should be on the base not the back.
After some time allowed for cooling the laptop the final temperatures were taken, and a further drop in temperature was noted when the final series of readings were done. The temperature was still fluctuating a little but it was down to 30-31 degrees. Now it does sound like a lot, but half of that roughly was merely by propping the laptop up on something. The rest was done by airflow.
Now is it worth buying one?
To be honest I am torn here, it does aid in battery life, but that being said you have to power it from the USB port. Even though its not a lot of power needed. What you can gain in one sense you can lose a bit of by powering it. So you do gain, over all when you look at the bigger picture. The only thing that gave me issues, and Im trying to be fair here was the shape and size of it. Admittedly its a compact cooling solution but some people will find it hard to transport even though its light and strong. The only thing that does limit its transportation in some laptop bags is the shape.
Apart from that its a good product, it works and works well. It does deliver and even has a pair of fans on low power to move the air. Its not high volumes of air, but it is enough to keep the noise down and the heat off. Im not decided as to whether it will suit everyone, I dont think it will, but it is a great unit, well made and very light indeed. For the majority, its a good investment, and one that will no doubt last some years with care. Even if you dont use the fans all the time, the height and adjustable feet offer you varying angles for comfort and the additional cooling with fans on or off making it versatile and practical. You have the control at your fingertips, all you need to decide, is when you use the fans for the extra cooling, and when you use the stand on its own.
