How To Keep Your Notebook Cool: Laptop Lifts Review

Laptop Lifts

Laptop Lifts offers a product with a very simple function: rubber feet with adhesive on them that will raise your notebook higher than traditional manufacturer rubber feet allow. The idea being that with an elevated notebook, it should have better circulation and thus cooler operating temperatures.

There is a large range of notebook coolers on the market that provide a similar function but usually at a much higher cost and added inconvenience of bulk.  We figure a gaming notebook would be the perfect candidate to test this product out since high end notebooks like the Alienware M18x tend to exhaust a lot of heat and require ample cooling.

We opted to clean the bottom surface of our notebook with isopropyl alcohol since it is quick to dry and leaves no residue behind. Once the notebook was fully cleaned, we placed tape on areas of the notebook to hold the laptop lifts so that we could test them out before permanently fixing them to the notebook (Note: The laptop lifts adhesive is only good for a one time use). Once the Laptop Lifts were applied permanently, we found the adhesive to be quite strong so there should be no problems with the feet falling off.

Benchmarks

We wanted to test this product out using different scenarios varying from typical usage to heavy loads. To ensure the results are reliable, ambient temperature in the room was kept constant throughout the testing.

Gaming Test: Battlefield 3

For our gaming test we used the popular PC game Battlefield 3. Since Battlefield 3 is a multithreaded DX11 title, it makes for an ideal game which to measure CPU and GPU temperatures. The game was run at 1920×1080 resolution using the game’s “Ultra” preset.

We joined a 64 player server and played for approximately 15 minutes each time on the same map (Operation Firestorm) where there was plenty of action going on. We used ThrottleStop 4.0 and HWiNFO64 to measure our CPU and GPU temperatures. The CPU load temperature dropped by 6 Celsius while the GPU load temperature dropped by 2 Celsius.

WPrime 1.55

WPrime 1.55 Load Temps After Application

WPrime is one of those benchmarks that many use to test stability as well as for gauging  how fast their CPU is compared to others. We configured it to run with 8 threads and 100% load on the CPU to see how much of a difference Laptop Lifts would have on the temperatures. We again measured the temperatures using ThrottleStop 4.0 and took the average temperature of the eight threads as the final value for load temperature.  The results speak for themselves, we calculated an average of nearly 6 degrees Celsius drop in load temperatures which is excellent.

Sony Vegas

The rendering test was done using Sony Vegas and a  17 second long 1080P video clip rendered as an MP4 at 29.9 fps and a bitrate of 20,000 bps. Sony Vegas is able to place a full load on the CPU during rendering so this provided a good medium to measure CPU load temperatures before and after applying Laptop Lifts. The results show a 5 degree Celsius drop which is close to the same drop in temperatures experienced when we tested WPrime. This drop in temperature can make a noticeable difference in render times since the thermal throttling limit of a 2920xm in an M18x is around 90C.

Typical Usage

Editor’s Note: We adjusted the axis of the Typical Usage graph to better reflect the difference in temperature. The data however remains unchanged.

We were curious about how temperatures would be affected during day-to-day web surfing activities so we chose to use Google’s Chrome browser with several tabs open including Pandora, Tech|Inferno’s website and forum, and Yahoo News. We found the CPU simply did not get warm enough during normal usage to show much temperature difference although we still saw nearly 1 celsius drop after applying Laptop Lifts.

Netflix Streaming Video

For this test we opened an instance of a Netflix video stream and measured the CPU and GPU temperatures since Flash with hardware acceleration tends to put load on both the processor and GPU. We let the stream run for about 10 minutes and then measured the CPU temperature using ThrottleStop 4.0 and the GPU temperature using HWiNFO64. We again took the average of all 8 CPU threads to calculate the average load temperature and used the GPU max temperatures reported by HWiNFO64. Our results show a 6 degree Celsius drop for GPU load temperatures  and 3 degrees Celsius  for the CPU.

Laptop Lifts is a very simple product that promises to lower your notebook’s temperatures by raising it higher than stock rubber feet allow. This gives added airflow to the notebook while at the same time protecting it from potential spills. So does this low cost product live up to expectations? Absolutely! We think Laptop Lifts is an excellent product for the average notebook owner as well as high performance notebook owners such as ourselves. For the price,  especially compared to traditional bulky notebook coolers, Laptop Lifts is an undeniable value that will extend the life of your notebook with cooler running temperatures.

To purchase your own set of Laptop Lifts, visit their website: http://laptoplifts.com/